[SOME 

[modern 

iFRENGH^ 
|W,RITERS, 

j G. Turc[u-et-MiInes 



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Class 
Book 



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Gopyiightlv^. 



COKRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



Some 

Modern Fren.ch 

Writers 

A STUDY IN BERGSONISM 



By 
G. TURQUET-MILNES 

Author of "The Ikfluence of Baudelaire," 
"Some Modern Belgian Writers," etc. 




NEW YORK 

EGBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 

1921 



Copyright, 1921, by 
Robert M. McBride & Co. 






Printed in the 

United States of America 



K,: 



Published, 1921 



©CI.A622428 






^-Lt. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface i 

The Trend of French Contemporary Thought . 1 

Henri Bergson 51 

Maurice Barres 79 

Paul Bourget 107 

Anatole France . . . ., 131 

Paul Claudel 155 

Jules Romains 186 

Jean Mor^as 195 

Charles Peguy 212 

Emile Clermont 242 

Bibliography 261 

Index 297 



PREFACE 

THOSE critics who study the destiny of philo- 
sophical ideas for the ironical pleasure of 
seeing them work in exactly the opposite 
direction from that which their founders intended 
have not failed to remark that the two great move- 
ments of French thought since the 16th century — 
Calvinism and Cartesianism — developed states of 
mind-utterly different from those Calvin and Des- 
carte^ wished to create. Descartes would have 
been horrified to hear himself called the father of 
the French Revolution, and Calvin equally so at 
being called one of the founders of free thought. 

It would seem, then, that in addition to the 
impetus given by a powerful writer, there is another 
and more powerful movement to which the first 
must conform, if it is to succeed. The fact is, that 
when we cut up society into slices, two important 
groups are soon discovered — the political and the 
literary, and the former always ends by absorbing 
the latter, except in the very rare case of a genius 
who is both legislative and poetical: Mahomet, for 
example. The social aspirations of a people always 
manage to get themselves adopted in the end, and 
that for obvious reasons. Vox populi, Vox Dei. 
The only doctrines which have a chance of sur- 
viving are those which in the course of time blend 
not only with the tendencies cf the moment, but 
with the general spirit of a nation, nay, of mankind. 

A study of history shows us humanity's progress 



ii PREFACE 

as one long, long journey towards an increasingly 
complete, ever-Mgher freedom. In tnitli no spec- 
tacle is better calculated to rejoice the heart of the 
idealist, since humanity, in spite of stumbles and 
backslidings, succeeds little by little in freeing itself 
from its material and materialistic fetters, and in 
ushering in a reign of more justice, more happiness, 
more liberty. 

In France, just before the outbreak of the war, 
we were looking on at a philosophic and literary 
movement which, in the width of responsive undu- 
lations it has produced in the world at large, may 
well be compared with the movement determined 
by Descartes. Greatly as we may esteem certain 
modern philosophers, it is no insult to them to say 
that it is M. Bergson who has the widest world- 
reputation. Japan studies him with the same ardor 
as Sweden or America. Every year sees the roll of 
his disciples swelling in England. Attention to 
him and to his famous doctrine of la realite qui sfi 
fait becomes more and more pronounced all over 
the world. 

"What fate does the future hold in store for him? 
Only our grandchildren can answer that question. 
Still, it is permissible to foretell the future, or even, 
in the pragmatist's way, to make it. 

If we questioned Bergson himself on this point, 
he would tell us that his doctrine, like every product 
of the human brain, is a progressive thing, by no 
means perfect nor complete nor absolute. I am 
only a man ; therefore you must not ask me for more 
than I can give. I have merely tried to get into 
close touch with that nature which always eludes 
us. For the riches of nature are inexhaustible — 
things do not begin, nor do they end, nor are they 
as we see them, nor as we should wish them to be. 



PEEFACE iii 

We are placed in front of an admirable and 
beneficent fluid in which anything may happen, 
especially the unexpected; and philosophical sys- 
tems can never be more than the mind^s points of 
view, more or less correct, but really incomplete, in 
comparison with Eeality, the Reality which we shall 
know some day. So that it would be a great mistake 
to ask of science the divine light to guide us 
through the reefs and shoals of existence, for the 
very good reason that life is not made for our in- 
tellect, but our intellect for life. Nature, too, is 
ever present to teach us modesty and patience. But 
it will take us a long time to correct ourselves of 
this habit of constructing and deducing ad infinitum 
— if we ever do. And we should therefore not be 
astonished to find that many have sought a supreme 
rule in Bergsonian philosophy, and that they have 
seen in Bergs on first and foremost a director of 
consciences and even a new prophet. And yet, up 
to the present, M. Bergson's works are not con- 
cerned with ethical questions. It may even be said 
that the religious idea appears only late in Berg- 
sonian philosophy. 

To tell the truth, after the publication of his 
first book, Essai sur les donnees immediates de la 
Conscience (1887), philosophers also had wondered 
what consequences were to be deduced from 
a doctrine which aimed at destroying all meta- 
physical constructions, and at being guided 
only by experience. It is enough to remem- 
ber an article by M. Jean Weber: Une nouvelle 
theorie de Vacte et ses consequences, which 
appeared in the Revue de MetapJvysique et de Morale 
in September, 1894. It seems that at that date, 
Bergson's budding doctrine appeared to some as 
an excellent excuse for all the actions of human 



iv PREFACE 

nature, licit or illicit, and Bergson iiimself as a 
new Seneca to new Neroes ! 

And M. J. Segond in a note in Ms book on 
I'Intuition hergsonienne (p. 144) tells ns tbat M. 
Ravaisson, towards the same date, asked M. Berg- 
son if lie were to be classed among the adepts of 
such a brntal naturalism. 

The attitude of the Bergson of those days was 
far from being dearly defined; it seemed Janus- 
faced. And at the same time, this philosopher who 
only wanted to be a philosopher found himself 
hailed as the enemy of science and the slanderer 
of intellect. 

What is the truth of the matter? M. Bergson 's 
other books, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolu- 
tion, soon dispersed the doubts in the public mind. 
Little by little, in spite of misunderstandings, 
Bergson appeared as the apostle of conscience, 
freedom, action and creation. But so many had 
been that before him, in a different way, it is true, 
yet groping along the same path, that we are forced 
to try and explain the immense success of Bergson 
in France to-day. 

Bergson is a part of a vast movement of con- 
temporary French thought. He is not the creator 
of the movement, but he has profited by it: the 
great social, literary and philosophic wave has 
carried him on to fame. He would be the first to 
acknowledge it, ever ready as he is to take into 
account the society in which a human being moves, 
and his natural surroundings.* 

•That is the explanation of his love of metaphor with which 
some critics have reproached him. According to Bergson these 
brilliant pictures are given to us by Nature herself; through them 
we enter into a more complete imion with Reality. That is also the 
reason why men of letters study him, because he is so literary 
himself and so intensely preoccupied with life. Take for example 
that passage in Time and Free Will : "How do you become aware of 



PEEFACE V 

Bergson^s influence drew additional strength from 
the enormous impetus in contemporary science and 
metaphysics, from the idea underlying all the great 
work of the Nineteenth Century that life is an 
absolutely original movement, and that truth is 
more or less biological, always in the making. Mr. 
Chesterton has a good page in his Victorian Age 
in Literature where he says that the struggle 
between the old spiritual theory and the new 
material theory ended in a deadlock. I should be 
more inclined to say that the movement ended in a 
tangent, in escape from the materialist as well as 
from the spiritual circle. Life is not due to a 
synthesis of material elements, nor, for the matter 
of that, is it la kind of enteleohy conceived as an 
external principle to niatter. Moreover, Darwin 
had taught that the universe had not been created 
once for all, Hegel that the Idea was the living 
energy of an intelligence always on the march: the 
former saw life as still unfolding itself, the latter 
saw history as a thing of flux and mobility, since 
the Absolute is the Becoming. The same poetical 
thought petrified into a theory could be found, more 
or less disguised, in such works as Newman's Essay 
on the Development of Christian Doctrine-* it is 
like a seed floating in the air and takes root in every 
country and in all parts of every country. 

Adaptiveness might be the formula for such 
doctrine : the struggle for truth is the life of truth. 

Therefore, when Bergson came with his announce- 

a deep passion once it has taken hold of you, if not by perceiving 
that the same objects no longer impress you in the same manner?" 
Every great novelist proves the truth of Bergson's words when he 
tries to show his hero or heroine in the grip of a deep passion. 

•There is one of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Catholicisme et 
Critique, by M. Paul Desjardins, which is full of the Bergsonian 
doctrine when read between the lines. 



vi PEEFACE 

ment tbat reality is the flux and that things are 
views of the flux, he found an audience in an extra- 
ordinary state of receptivity, because it was already 
convinced that in the world, as in each of us, there 
is a vitality which grows and evolves from within. 

A philosophy which does not wish to use logical 
exposition, but which appeals to our primordial 
intuitions and above all to the SBsthetic instinct, had 
every chance of success in the France of 1890. Of 
course, many influences were working in the same 
direction as that of Bergson. Many brooks swelled 
the waters of the Bergsonian river, before it joined 
the great contemporary flood which bears us on 
past the illusions of finalism and mechanism into 
the kingdom of the unfettered and intuitive Spirit. 

Thus it would be very rash to tie down the literary 
movement of the last years of the Nineteenth 
Century and of the opening ones of the Twentieth 
to the single name of Bergson. He did not endow 
it with those dreamy, subtle, suggestive, essentially 
musical qualities which we admire in it. Symbolist 
poetry, the art of Barres and of Maeterlinck came 
before the triumph of the Bergsonian philosophy, 
and certainly before its influence. Natura non facit 
saltum. If by Bergsonism we understand the feeling 
of the unity and brotherhood in life, or even the 
doctrine of the intuitive method, then Bergsonism 
was in existence before Bergson. After the 
Parnassian school which aimed at reproducing the 
plastic beauty of antiquity, after the Realistic 
school which sought either to paint society in its 
various sections, or simply to show human nature 
at its ugliest, a new literary group formed which 
had respect for the soul and above all a love of 
spiritual and mortal life, and which was to be joined 
by a second group whose cult was action. 



PEEFACE vii 

So that, leaving on one side the pornographic 
publications, produced mainly for foreign consump- 
tion, and the purely worldly novel, the connection 
between Bergsonism and contemporary French 
literature is merely a link of harmony. Flaubert, in 
one of his letters to Georges Sand, says: **Have 
you ever noticed the current of similar ideas there 
is sometimes in the air? I have just been reading 
a novel, Les Forces Perdues, by my friend Du Camp. 
In many ways it is very like what I am now writing 
myself.''* 

In any case, if Bergsonism owes its success to a 
long-felt spiritual need, it must also be admitted 
that it has singularly helped to bring about the 
triumph of this tendency. It is a wonderful leaven 
pervading an enormous mass of literature and 
changing it into a nourishing substance. 

The history of literature from 1890 to 1918 is 
largely the history of a vast reaction on the part of 
young writers against the mechanist philosophy. 
Now Bergson, by affirming that the reigning intel- 
lectualism of his youth misread life with its count- 
less aspects, and nature with her infinite fecundity ; 
that our concepts were but schematic designs of a 
fluid and complex reality; that there was such a 
thing as Psychological Time, and that we were free 
precisely on account of this Psychological Time; 
that life is the ultimate reality; that we live in a 
universe in which tout n^est pas donne, in which 
something new happens at every moment, in which 
there is freedom at the heart of things,- — rendered 
invaluable assistance to the young generation which 
was seeking to break the chains which weighed so 
heavily upon it. 

*Correspondence III, p. 481. Oeuvres CompUtes de Flaubert. 
Paris. Louis Conrad, MCMX. 



viii PEEFACE 

Once again, we must not exaggerate nor attribute 
to Bergson more than his due. Philosophy rules 
one kingdom land literature another. It would be 
very easy for a critic to show that Zola's works 
were being printed in their thousands, while Berg- 
son's were making their way very slowly. To 
believe that **to any given poetical tendency there 
corresponds at the same time a philosophical 
tendency," to quote M. T. de Visan,* is to fall victim 
to a formula. Consider for a moment the Victorian 
Age of English literature. At a moment when 
Darwin and Huxley triumphed in so many minds, 
there were also writing Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, 
Tennyson, Browming, all anti-intellectualists with 
something of the Bergsonian spirit and before 
Bergson 's time.f There are too many currents and 
under-currents in modern society to allow of arrival 
at absolute truth on this point. The writer, who 
saw in the pragmatism of William James, or the 
humanism of Professor Schiller, a proof of Anglo- 
Saxon mysticism, would be immediately contra- 
dicted by another writer, who would show that these 
philosophical movements are the outcome of Anglo- 
Saxon common sense. 

However that may be, Bergson found himself in 
harmony with certain theories of a certain school 
towards 1890. But when the ^^lyceens" of 1890-1905 
began to write they naturally tried to express what 
they had been taught by their favorite philosopher 

*Taiicrede de Visan. L'attitude du lyrisme contemporain, p, 432. 
Paris. Mercure de France. 

•f-I have often wondered whether Bergson may not have been 
profoundly, albeit unconsciously, influenced by these writers, through 
his upbringing, which was partly English. In any case one could 
make a complete study of Browning, giving his work Bergson's 
philosophy for substratum. The resemoiances are striking even for 
the most casual reader. See also on this subject Bergson and the 
Modern Spirit, by G. R. Dodson, pp. 290-1. 



PREFACE ix 

— Bergson — or by t^ieir professor^s favorite phil- 
osopher — again Bergson. 

But here once more it would be easy to find among 
these young men the two types which Flaubert 
painted for the generation of 1848 in his Education 
Sentimentale: the Frederic Moreau type, senti- 
mental, dreamy, and consequently with some lean- 
ings towards a certain kind of Bergsonism ; and the 
Deslauriers type, hardworking, energetic, arriviste, 
and with leanings toward politics. 

Just as, according to Bergson, there are two 
modes of apprehending reality, intellect and intui- 
tion, so there are two different types of minds, the 
realist and the nominalist, the intellectual and the 
mystic, the prosaic and the idealist. The most we 
can succeed in showing is the recrudescence of 
mysticism,* and the renewal of poetry in our own 
day. If to that we add the numerous works which 
have appeared on the reduplication of personality, 
on psychic phenomena, or spiritism, or occultism, 
or the idea spread abroad by poets and philosophers 
that our psychological depths are rich in unexplored 
treasure, or Comte's two favorite ideas that the 
living are governed by the dead, and that reason 
must not be separated from instinct, we see that 
Bergson ^s philosophy had everything to gain from 
such contemporary states of mind. 

*We must always bear in mind that, strange as it may appear to 
some of his followers, Bergson's doctrine is a protest against mystic- 
ism. "If by mysticism be meant (as it almost always is nowadays) 
a reaction against positive science, the doctrine which I defend is in 
the end only a protest against mysticism." {Introd. to the Philoso- 
phy of Bergson. A. D. Lindsay, p. 19.) For M. Bergson there are 
other sciences than mathematics; in the biological sciences, for in- 
stance, there are inquiries which have their own standard and which 
give us certain and positive knowledge. In reality Bergson is at one 
with Descartes, whose Cogito ergo sum is not a syllogism, but a 
thing known of itself. Mind sees itself as a first reality, by an in- 
tuition which precedes all deduction and every syllogism. 



X PEEFACE 

One is almost tempted to apply to Bergson 
Carlyle's words on Diderot: ^' Grant doubtless that 
a certain perennial spirit true for all times and all 
countries, can and must look through the thinking 

of certain men, be it in what dialect soever 

Let us remember that the highly gifted, high-striv- 
ing Diderot was born in the point of Time and of 
Space when of all uses he could turn himself to, of 
all dialects speak in, this of Polemical Philosophism, 
and no other, seemed the most promising and fittest. 
Let us remember, too, that no earnest man, in any 
time, ever spoke what was wholly meaningless. '* 
We might adapt Carlyle by saying, not that a per- 
petual spirit was created for Bergson, but that a 
tendency, an impulse, brought him to the height of 
the evolution of French Thought, of that thought 
which is always eminently sociable and humane, 
always *' suspicious of the inelasticity of things.''* 

In this sense Bergson has been the conscience of 
his pupils in the lycee, of his disciples at the College 
de France, of his admirers in the world, and through 
them of an important part of contemporary France, 
and of a time. Through him have been clarified 
certain ideas which are still half obscure in his 
contemporaries ; above all, his method has imposed 
itself more and more — a method essentially suited 
to the French genius, made up of common sense, 
humanity, kindness and sympathy. 

The man, who has so rightly emphasized the social 
function of laughter, has never ceased to be amused 
by those men who regard life as a pre-arranged 
programme, and it may be said that the Bergsonian 
doctrine is above all the doctrine of a mind which is 
always open to life, and which refuses to be im- 
prisoned in any system. Omnis determinatio 

*Bergson: Le Rire. 



PEEFACE xi 

negatio, said Spinoza. That miglit be Bergson's 
motto, even as it is that of the best minds of his 
time. 

The aim of the following pages is to show that 
c rtain temperaments at the close of the 19th Cen- 
tury have felt with Bergson the need of reaction 
against the mechanism of a purely conceptualist 
philosophy, and that others have clearly been influ- 
enced by Bergsonian philosophy and have propa- 
gated it in their writings.* 

Bergson will be the first to rejoice in his harmony 
with some of the best literature of his day: he will 
see therein proof that he has not missed his way. 
Books like those of Maurice Barres and Claudel, of 
two great travelers amid spiritual and material 
scenery, are well calculated to explain a doctrine 
which has been wittily called ^Hhe doctrine of the 
cinema. ' 'f Omnis comparatio claudicat, and this 
comparison is really misleading. For the cinema at 
its best is nothing but a Punch and Judy show in 
which life is split up into a certain number of tragic 
or comic scenes, linked together in a fictitious unity, 
and teaching a somewhat histrionic morality. But in 
Bergson 's philosophy time flows on unceasingly, like 
an endless and ever new melody which cannot be 
divided or subdivided, but would vanish away at the 
first attempt to number its component notes. His- 
tory might be made to give us the best illustration of 
Bergsonian time, for History never repeats itself, 
nor can its phenomena be predicted, yet it is always 
intelligible, nay, full of pregnant lessons, when in 

*M. Bergson, in his "notice" on M. Felix Ravaisson-Mollien, showed 
very clearly that the tendency of philosophers and scholars who 
deepen the nature of life is to "reintegrate thought in the heart of 
nature," and as examples he cites Auguste Comte and Claude 
Bernard. 

tM. Gaston Rageot. Revue de Paris, February, 1918. 



xii PREFACE 

tlie hands of genms. No one could have foreseen 
that the Napoleonic empire would arise after 
Robespierre 's fall ; and if Waterloo was indeed won 
on the playing fields of Eton, other Waterloos have 
been lost on those same fields. The truth of the 
matter is that neither History nor Time is a pano- 
rama on rollers wrapping and unwrapping their 
matter one on to the other. 

Society is not the creation of pure reason, it 
was not created by any * ^ social contract. ' ' It is the 
creation of Time, and this appears as a complex 
indivisible whole in which every citizen is the con- 
tinuation of his forefathers.* We are limited, but 
reality is making itself, world without end. 

If the philosophy of duration has become the 
philosophy of free will, if Bergson in a celebrated 
speech has chastised the German barbarism, which 
is due to Prussian administration and military 
mechanism, it is because every philosophical system 
can be sustained only by a frankly spiritual idea, 
and that is the greatest homage the universe can 
render to metaphysics! 

In this way the moral questions Bergson wished 
to banish from his books necessarily re-enter.f Mr. 
Balfour, writing of Bergson, says: *^This free con- 
sciousness pursues no final end, it follows no pre- 
determined design It is ignorant not only 

of its course but of its goal ; and for the sufficient 
reason, that, in M. Bergson 's view, these things 
are not only unknown, but unknowable 

*It is pleasant to quote M. Barres in this connection. Speaking of 
himself and his companions, he says: "Tout Tunivers pour nous, je 
le vois maintenant, etait desosse en quelque sorte, sans charpente, 
prive de ce qui fait la stabilite dans ses changements." {Stwnislaa 
de Ouaita, p. 135. Amori et Dolori Sacrum.) 

f'Humanity will not, and cannot acquiesce in a Godless world," 
p. 118. Pragnuitism wnd Id§Q,li§mt by Caldwell William, London, 
A. & C. Black, 1913. 



PREFACE xiii 

Creation, freedom, will, — these, doubtless, are 
great things; but we cannot lastingly admire them 
unless we know their drift/* 

But perhaps Mr. Balfour had forgotten these 
words of Bergson's: *^I see in the whole evolution 
of life on our planet an effort of this essentially 
creative force to arrive by traversing matter, at 
something which is only realized in man, and which, 
moreover, even in man is realized only imper- 
fectly/'* These words, not to mention the letter to 
Father de Tonquedec, show clearly that for Bergson, 
after all, life must have an aim, but at the same time 
must be always in the making. For otherwise what 
would become of free-will? Morality enfolds us on 
every side, or if we will have none of it. Love, or if 
that be lacking, Life itself would teach. Bergson 's 
disciples, as we shall see, have fully realized this. 

What happens to-day? The radiance of those 
countries which have fought for right and freedom 
is the outcome of the fact that they are the living 
symbol of the immutable, universal, and necessary 
conscience of the human race, the sign of those 
moral forces which will in the end prove of more 
effect than physical forces in putting an end to 
strifes which are the shame of humanity. 

East Wittering. 1916-1918. 

*Life and Consciousness. The Hibhert Journal, October, 1911, 
p. 38. Bergson adds, p. 40, "I doubt that the evolution of life will 
ever be explained by a mere combination of mechanical forces. Obvi- 
ously there is a vital impulse: what I was just calling an impulse 
towards a higher and higher efl&ciency, something which ever seeks 
to transcend itself, to extract from itself more than there is — in a 
word, to create." 



THE TREND OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH 
THOUGHT 

IF there is a law which seems to rule literature 
as also human thought, it is the law of reac- 
tion, or, as it might be called, the law of con- 
tradiction. I mean that law which none of us can 
escape, and which instinctively forces us to examine, 
criticize, and generally combat an opinion laid be- 
fore us, and admitted by a certain group of men. 
In France, particularly, we see this law working in 
all the efforts of human thought, as we look back 
upon the centuries of the Christian era. So long 
as man's mind is preoccupied mainly by religious 
problems, we see countless heresies standing in the 
path of orthodox faith. When the Gallic mind first 
longed to represent the spectacle of life, there 
sprang up at once the fabliaux, all that caustic, 
gaulois, and not infrequently obscene, literature 
which makes mock of the chansons de geste. 

Later, after the emancipation of the Renaissance, 
the Seventeenth Century busies itself with finding 
an answer to the Sixteenth: Pascal fights Mon- 
taigne. In the Seventeenth Century itself the so- 
called classical school with Moliere, Boileau and 
Racine is opposed to the romanticism of 1630, Theo- 
phile de Viau, St. Amand as well as Corneille. The 
Eighteenth Century — from the point of view of ideas 
alone — is one long struggle against the so-called 
religious despotism of the Seventeenth. Yet even 

in the Eighteenth Century we have Rousseau form- 

1 



2 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

ing a link with tlie tradition of Pascal and offering 
opposition to Voltaire. Then Eomanticism, born of 
Eoussean and Bernardin de Saint Pierre, is in its 
turn attacked by the positivist school. Finally in 
our own time we see the great positivist school of 
1850 harassed by pragmatism, and we look on at an 
extraordinary religious revival. It is remarkable 
that as we advance in time the reactionary move- 
ments lose in breadth. The Eenaissance, for ex- 
ample, is an immense opposition to the Middle Ages 
taken as a whole. The EncyclopaBdic School is an- 
other no less formidable to Seventeenth- Century 
thought. But after 1750 it may be said that the 
movements of flux and reflux are much less marked. 
They are gentle swings of the pendulum. In Eous- 
seau's day and in Chateaubriand ^s, Voltairean 
thought has its partisans, just as today. Thence 
springs a great feeling of uneasiness in a society 
divided against itself, and which has by turns thirst 
for, and horror of, reality, or what it believes to be 
reality. Those are the two great needs of humanity 
ever clamoring for satisfaction and it sometimes 
happens, as with Balzac and Flaubert, that a realist 
and a romanticist are to be found in the same man 
— constantly tripping up one another. For the vari- 
ous philosophies and various schools are the prod- 
uct of conflicting temperaments, as well as of dif- 
ferent environment. There are moments as well as 
humors in which positivism and naturalism seem to 
be the last word of human thought. At other mo- 
ments it may be that idealism, in all its meanings, 
appears as the open sesame of metaphysics and 
truth. 

The most important thing to do, then, is to try and 
sketch the two main doctrines that are shared by 
French minds of today. The first, which is that of 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 3 

tlie French positivists, ** savants/' and ** agnostics,*' 
is preached by very different thinkers — by Comte 
in the first place, then by Taine and Renan, to take 
only a few great names in literature. This school, 
which is called sometimes the naturalistic school, 
has for its foundation the ideas that the world is a 
purely mechanical problem, that science is merely 
an affair of analysis or mathematics, that man is a 
walking theorem, or a product pure and simple of 
his own sensations. 

These views have received earnest support from 
such men as Dr, Charcot who at the Salpetriere hos- 
pital undertook to reproduce most of the miracles 
of the Gospel: or from Zola and his school whose 
Roman experimental was supposed to be an exposi- 
tion of the ideas of Claude Bernard. It is easy to 
understand that such views had an immense success 
with the French mind, which is above all a critical 
investigating mind, with a passion for arranging the 
universe and for building it up into a symmetrical 
Versailles Palace or French garden. To the French- 
man, living as he does under a bright sky against 
which everything stands out clearly defined, the 
universe seems to be something easily understood 
and known. Nothing is true save that which Reason 
discovers. 

But from time to time Inspiration bursts into 
flame, and then the icy splendors of Logic melt be- 
fore the fiery light of Instinct, that inscrutable, in- 
vincible force of nature which rules the world from 
its very beginning.* The French mind, delighting in 
accurate, clear-cut form and order, hating the ex- 
travagant and the shapeless, does not trust such a 
terrifying revolutionary Power ; it believes that sci- 

*Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics: authorized translation 
by T. E. Hulme. 



4 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

entific knowledge is a science '^pre-formed and even 
pre-formulated in Nature as Aristotle believed/' 
Bergson makes fun of this tendency and his illustra- 
tion is too neat not to be quoted. * ^ Great discoveries 
then serve only to illuminate point by point the al- 
ready drawn line of this logic, immanent in things, 
just as on the night of a fete we light up one by one 
the rows of gas jets which already outline the shape 
of our building/'* 

Descartes had affirmed universal mechanism, but 
he was always careful to keep man's free will. Fol- 
lowing him, taking him as their authority, the 
greater number of French scholars and philosophers 
saw nothing but a system of laws in the universe. 
With the Nineteenth Century came the biologists 
who declared that the phenomena of thought, like 
the phenomena of life, speech, circulation, respira- 
tion, digestion, were all alike physico-chemical phe- 
nomena, which are at once very complicated and 
very simple. With marvellous ingenuity and depth 
of knowledge, they showed how heredity can ex- 
plain the problems of natural selection and variabil- 
ity, the formation of the different living species, and 
the adaptability which links every living being to 
its surroundings. So that if, as they hold, every 
living being is composed of cells which are practi- 
cally similar in the whole animal and vegetable scale, 
the problem of the origin of life is that of the pri- 
mary origin of the living cell. Primeval mud must 
be the ancestor of the whole fauna and flora of this 
planet, and life must have emerged automatically 
from inorganic matter. We see also that man is 
an affair of machinery ; his thought is only a trans- 

*Bergsoii, An Introduction to Metaphysics : authorized translation 
by T. E. Hulme. 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 5 

formed sensation; given the brain, thought is also 
given; suppress the brain, thought also is sup- 
pressed — and thus thinking appears not only as the 
natural function of the brain, but as the ephemeral 
effect of an explosive force. In fine, man is an 
automaton created by thousands of causes, at the 
knowledge of which we may some day arrive.* 
There is neither instinct nor intelligence, but merely 
a cerebral function or phosphorescence which is bet- 
ter developed in man than in, say, an ant: man^s 
reason being only a mental peculiarity advantage- 
ous to the survival of the species, and therefore safe- 
guarded by heredity. 

Taine is, in France, the great representative 
writer who best personified this mode of thought. 
The conception, of course, existed long before his 
day, but his was the gift of clothing his phrases with 
a magic style, and the mysterious power of his art 
gave him an extraordinary influence over two gen- 
erations of Frenchmen. 

Yet, at the moment when this materialistic philos- 
ophy seemed to triumph, a large number of minds 
were reacting against it. Most of them called to 
their help all those thinkers who had declared that 
pure reason was unable to furnish a serious founda- 
tion of morality. It is only fair to add here that 
Kant by his recognition of man as a moral being had 
thereby placed him above nature. Moreover his 
doctrine of the Categorical Imperative worked won- 
ders in minds impassioned for justice and making 
facts the slaves of Right. And, as this was the great 

*It seems a far cry to the time when a man will have the courage 
to say that the brain does not trace all the details of consciousness 
and that consciousness itself is not a function of the brain. Berg- 
son, L'dme et le corps, p. 17. Le materialisme actuel, Paris, Ernest 
Flammarion. 



6 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

moment of German influence in the world, coinciding 
with a renaissance of Protestantism in France, 
Kant^s star shone forth with added lustre, and the 
German Romantics, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, as 
well as Jacobi and Herder, told us at every turn 
that logical intelligence was as nothing compared 
with spontaneous sentiment. Schopenhauer himself 
tried to prove later on that the Will to live domi- 
nated intelligence, and Hartmann that the subcon- 
scious in nature played by far the most important 
part. In any case, this more or less German meta- 
physic (for its inspiration can be traced to Rous- 
seau) would not have met with the success it did 
if science herself had not come to its help. For the 
mind is never content with a single hypothesis, and 
quickly wearies of one generalization, especially if 
that generalization aim at imposing a purely deter- 
minist theory. The battles waged by scholar upon 
scholar soon convinced the thinking public that all 
scientific theories might be after all only hypotheses. 

M. Henri Poincare in France echoed Lord Kelvin 
in England, when he declared that science was a mat- 
ter of practical results and could never unveil the 
mystery enfolding us on every side. ^*I have al- 
ways felt,'' said Lord Kelvin, ^Hhat the hypothesis 
of natural selection does not contain the true theory 
of evolution, if evolution there has been in biology. 
... I feel profoundly convinced that the argument 
of design has been greatly too much lost sight of 
in recent zoological speculations. Overpoweringly 
strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design 
lie around us.'' 

Again, as M. Gaston Bonnier has shown, even Dar- 
win finds and obeys this idea of design; the flowers 
make themselves beautiful in order to please the 
bees; they spread their perfume abroad to attract 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 7 

these visitors. The doctrine of the *' happy acci- 
dent'' is itself a doctrine of finalism.* 

William James proved abundantly that Darwin- 
ism, rightly understood, cast the most serious doubts 
on the ** final adequacy of the mechanistic philoso- 
phy from which it seemed to spring. ' 'f Indeed the 
ideas of philosophers upon science, with their sub- 
versive tendencies, would never have been so popu- 
lar if scientific men had not themselves revolution- 
ised man's idea of science. Nous avons change tout 
cela: for it is not only the Sybil who writes on leaves 
scattered by the wind. Messrs. Duhem, Le Roy, 
Milhaud, Bernard Brunhes, Henri Poincare, have 
tried to prove in various articles and books that 
science had for real object not so much to discover 
and to know as to conquer and harness nature to 
her car. *^The mind is built up of practical inter- 
ests": a discovery is above all a useful truth, 
Claude Bernard in his famous Introduction a la 
Medecine Experimentale had rightly dwelt on the 
fact that the human mind, far from submitting itself 
to nature, picked out from among the phenomena 
under observation the particular one or ones which 
were to lead to a desired conclusion, and raised a 
class of facts into a law by a utilitarian and deliber- 
ate choice. Nature seen and understood — some- 
times misunderstood — by Mind : such is science. It 
is only the man of genius who, as William James 
puts it, ^* sticks in his bill at the right moment, and 
brings it out with the right element." If so, it is 
clear that the spontaneous activity of a free mind 
is at work in the creations of science. William 
James's Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891: 
granting that the book was not widely read in 

*See La Revue HeMomadaire, 1 Juillet 1911. Gaston Bonnier, 
Pour et contre le Darwinisme. 

tSee W. James, lay Howard V. Knox. Constable & Co., 1914. 



8 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITERS 

France, we can nevertheless surmise from the rela- 
tions between Eenouvier and his disciples and Wil- 
liam James, that the ideas, original as they are, were 
yet in the air at that moment. 

M. Duhem, in a very important article in the Re- 
vue des Questions Scientifiques de Bruxelles (July, 
1894), may be said to have belled the cat for French 
readers. M. Milhaud in his book le Rationnel 
(Paris, 1898) showed clearly and intelligibly that 
there is not a single scientific reasoning in which 
the mind has not the initiative. **The mind is at 
every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities, 
and knows it too. The old Latin dictum, nihil na- 
turae imperandum nisi parendo, must be properly 
understood. The mind submits to nature but to a 
nature chosen by itself.'^ All theories are merely 
symbols, and symbols are like pictures of an eternal 
nature — endowed with momentary truth. Science 
is simply the angle of vision from which certain 
savants contemplate the universe. Such men as Le 
Eoy, Bernard Brunhes, Duhem or Milhaud were re- 
pulsed by the idea of the Universe seen as a kind 
of Farmer's Almanac. These men hold that arith- 
metic cannot be the riddle of the Sphinx. Before 
their day we were taught that all sensations were 
illusions of the mind, except those of motion. But 
why make this exception? There is no reason for 
privileging motions. They may be illusions, too. 
There is no splendid and imperial isolation for one 
set of sensations. To admit one is to admit them 
all, quality as well as quantity. No one would want 
to add, say, flavors as you add temperatures, or 
claim that any cabbage contains forty per cent mus- 
tiness or any carrot thirty-five per cent redness and 
twenty-five per cent acidity. There are certainly 
some things which are irreducible to quantity. 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUaHT 9 

^^Quand nous faisons une theorie generale,'' said 
Claude Bernard, ^*la seule chose dont nous soyons 
certains, est que toutes ces theories sont f ausses, ab- 
solument parlant. . . . Les systemes tendent a as- 
servir Pesprit humain. ... La philosophie et la 
science ne doivent point etre systematiques.'' 

Mechanics, physics and chemistry have their own 
laws and dwell apart. They are and must be in- 
dependent of one another. Life is too big a thing 
to be betrayed into a chemistry book, a kind of new 
summum scientiae, and wrapped in the gown of a 
don. Such was the conclusion at which Pasteur and 
Claude Bernard had arrived. 

Science, then, — I speak of science in France, — 
is nowadays not so arrogant as she used to be. M. le 
Dantec, for instance, though an out-and-out materi- 
alist, shows a certain impatience and a pleasing 
fastidiousness over the lowly pretenses of some of 
his colleagues. Science for him is not a fairy god- 
mother who brings us the sugar plums of more 
happiness, more justice — the golden age, in fact. 
No, science must content herself with the part of a 
kind of Cinderella, busied with retorts and crucibles 
and lancets and knives and herbariums and larders ; 
she must be satisfied with verifying certain facts. 
Ne sutor ultra crepidam. 

M. Emile Boutroux, the great French philosopher 
who is so well known in England and America, had 
succeeded before the advent of Bergson in intro- 
ducing into our notion of science a far more subtle 
notion of science, or, to use his own words, in replac- 
ing *'la science faite'' by ^4a science qui se fait.'' 
His wonderfully clear style, with all its sincerity and 
fervor, has perhaps contributed more than any- 
thing else to showing that the only science that 
exists is science in the making, and that science 



10 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

in sucli a case is not a discovery but an invention. 
He is a true ^ ' Pascalist " ; Ms cheek flushes when 
he speaks of the great French thinker; and to my 
mind, when he realized that science is born of human 
thought and can preserve its truth only by remain- 
ing closely allied with our spiritual activity, it was 
after long reflection over Pascal's words: **If our 
view be arrested there, let our imagination pass be- 
yond: it will sooner exhaust the power of concep- 
tion than nature that of supplying material for con- 
ception. The whole visible world is only an imper- 
ceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature.'* **Is 
science really destined to absorb the whole man and 
to reduce him to the dust of atoms'? That hypoth- 
esis arises from a misunderstanding which Des- 
cartes denounced long ago. It supposes a confusion 
between science already formed or made and science 
which is in the making, or rather, a confusion be- 
tween science considered as a thing in itself and 
science as it actually exists. If science were a thing 
in itself, ready made from all eternity, — if man had 
nothing to do but to discover it as a treasure buried 
in the ground is discovered, — then it would be true 
that man does not really exist except in a scientific 
form — that is to say, so far as he is a man, he does 
not exist at all. But that so-called science in itself 
is nothing but a creation of reason imagined by 
metaphysicians of the Absolute, or by university 
professors inclined by profession to dogmatism. 
The only science which exists is the science which is 
being formed, the science which is becoming science 
— and that is not really a discovery, it is rather 
an invention. If there is one result which is plain, 
from the deep study which, in our day especially, 
has been made of the origin of science, it is this: 



CONTEMPORAEY FRENCH THOUGHT 11 

the essential and continuous part which the original 
activity of the mind has played and plays, both in 
the formation and elaboration of scientific concepts 
and in establishing the relations of phenomena to 
those concepts. I would be glad to apply to all 
science the theory which I have seen my master, M. 
Michel Breal, sustain in regard to language. 
Against those who assume to explain the phenomena 
of language by purely mechanical laws immanent 
in language itself, to wit : by simple invariable con- 
nections of elementary linguistic phenomena, Michel 
Breal sustains the proposition that the mind, for its 
own ends and by its own activity, with its capacity 
for trying, for groping its way, for choice, for adap- 
tation, for aesthetic arrangement, for improving, 
is the true creator and modifier of language. Mens 
agitat molem/^* 

But M. Emile Boutroux is not the only shrewd 
and frank French philosopher whose speculations 
are cheered by a bracing love of freedom. There 
were and are scores of writers whose task has been 
to free us from the fetters of self as of science, and 
to help us realize that the immense river of Life, 
compassed about and circumscribed by laws, oozes 
through all our dams and locks. 

Renouvier and Secretan and their disciples un- 
derstood that the problems of conscience and free 
will were such that it was well worth a man's while 
to devote his whole life to their consideration. 
After them came Bergson, hand in hand with Wil- 
liam James, the latter being perhaps the most 
widely read of all of them in France! They are 
surrounded by a brilliant group of philosophers 

*Emile Boutroux, Science and Culture. Princeton University 
Press, 1914. Pp. 22, 23. 



12 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

and scientists, sncli as Maurice Blondel, Edouard 
Le Roy, Joseph Wilbois, Gaston Milhaud, Marc 
Sangnier, to name only a few. 

A philosopher, however, is unlike an apothecary 
in that if he gives us a pill, it is we who gild it. And 
such philosophers as those we have named would 
not be supported by the public were it not that a 
large body of men of letters leads us to their dis- 
pensary. Among these literary men are names such 
as Brunetiere, Bourget, Barres, E. M. de Vogue, 
Faguet, so well known that it is needless to dwell 
here upon their characteristics. Different each from 
the other they all are, but all agree on one point — 
on trying not to broaden, but to deepen, the French 
mind. Nor should one forget the Taine of his later 
years, who desired a religious burial because he had 
realized the importance of ethics and religion. 

Towards 1850, or perhaps later, between 1850 and 
1880, science was the supreme idol before which all 
the other idols were sacrificed. Yet a certain num- 
ber of writers refused to bend the knee before the 
idol, and it is their books which at the present mo- 
ment are the favorite reading of thousands of 
Frenchmen; writings of men like Bergson or Bou- 
troux or Blondel or Le Roy, who appeal to profes- 
sional philosophers, down to M. Barres, the suc- 
cessor of Paul Deroulede at the head of the nation- 
alist movement, and immortal author of Colette 
Baudoche. 

All of these writers — and their agreement is 
worthy of remark — all without exception, whether 
Catholic or Protestant, repentant positivists or spir- 
itualists, all begin by declaring that if we have cer- 
tain physical needs, we have moral needs which are 
no less exacting, and that we must have a moral 
nourishment which will make us live by making us 



CONTEMPORAEY FRENCH THOUGHT 13 

desire to live. They all declare that our intelli- 
gence can only pick reality to pieces, can only give 
us schematic patterns of things. Anatole France, 
in Le Jar din d' Epicure^ has a happy image where he 
compares metaphysical systems with the platinum 
threads in astronomical telescopes. ^*Les fils 
sont utiles a (Pobservation des astres, mais ils 
sont de Phomme et non du ciel. II est bon qu'il y 
ait des fils de platine dans les lunettes, mais il 
ne faut pas oublier que c'est Popticien qui les a 
mis. * ' 

Reason is poor, but — which is worse — it is de- 
moralizing. The rationalistic doctrine is a doctrine 
of despair and death. ** Naturalistic philosophy,*' 
says Secretan, ^^does not agree with the moral faith 
which is the mainstay of our existence. Every moral 
doctrine rests upon duty and presupposes liberty.''* 
**Les formules ne sont pas vraies, elles sont com- 
modes, ' ' says M. H. Poincare. ' 't 

What thesis has scientific philosophy other than 
determinism? If all things are obedient to regular 
mechanical laws, the sacrifice of a mother for her 
child, or that of the scientist who gives his life for a 
discovery which shall benefit humanity, are move- 
ments every whit as necessary as the movement of 
the earth round the sun; they are the outcome of 
some primary movement — probably that of a mon- 
key in past ages defending a member of his tribe 
against the enemy. 

But if I accept this doctrine, if I may not believe 
in my freedom, I likewise am not at liberty to take 
seriously the dictates of my conscience. Kant pro- 
claimed this in no uncertain fashion. ^'I ought" 
implies **I can." If my liberty is only a phantom 

*iSecretaii, Le principe de la morale. 
\La Science et I'hypothese, 19C/. 



14 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

there is no question of ought , for in that case I can 
neither obey nor disobey duty.* 

Renouvier devoted the whole of a long and admira- 
bly industrious life to restating Kant's philosophy, 
while affirming the independence of human reason 
and reintegrating liberty in the world. Of course 
he has been laughed at by the naturalistic school. 
But, as Stevenson says, *^It is men who hold what 
seems to us a dangerous lie, who can extend our re- 
stricted field of knowledge and rouse our drowsy 
consciences." 

It is Renouvier who gave its impulse to pragma- 
tism, which measures the truth of every idea by the 
consequences contained therein. For him philoso- 
phy is the handmaiden of ethics. 

With his name should be associated not only that 
of his brilliant disciple Lequier, whose book la 
Feuille de Charmille should be read by every would- 
be believer in human liberty, but also that of a po- 
tent personality in the world of metaphysics, Felix 
Ravaisson, whose Rapport sur la Philosophie en 
France au XIX^ siecle, written on the occasion of 
the French Exhibition of 1867, will always remain a 
model of dialectics and resourceful strategy in de- 
fense of ethics and spirituality. Felix Ravaisson, 
for the twenty years following 1863, was President 
of the '^Concours d'Agregation de Philosophie^' ; his 
influence on French teachers of philosophy was 
therefore considerable. To him as to his master, 
Maine de Biran, is due that intellectual irritation at 
the stupidity of a purely mechanistic philosophy, as 
well as that charm of style, that poetical view of the 
world, that hellenic capacity for understanding 
things and that wonderful power of hovering on the 

*See Andre Cresson, Le Malaise de la pensie philosophique, or 
F. Pillon, Philosophie de Secretan. 



CONTEMPORAEY FEENCH THOUGHT 15 

boundary line which divides poetry from prose, 
which are the main characteristics of the work of 
such men as Leon Olle-Laprune, Maurice Blondel, 
Dunan or Le Roy. Nor may we omit to mention the 
names of such brilliant thinkers as Pillon, Victor 
Brochard, Victor Egger, Lionel Dauriac, Octave 
Hamelin, Penjon, Victor Delbos or Brunschvicg — 
to choose only a few — who, each in his separate 
style and for the most part holding aloof from any 
religious creed, have harassed the self-complacency 
of smug materialism. And this same note of revolt 
against false gods is to be heard in almost any num- 
ber of la Critique Philosophique (1868-1889) (con- 
tinued as VAnnee Philosophique from 1889 with M. 
Pillon as editor) and in La Revue de Metaphysique 
et de Morale (1890 in progress). 

There the reader may discover inexhaustible 
treasures of ideas and systems, and the most con- 
vincing proof, if proof were needed, of man's tire- 
less energy in the pursuit of ideals. 

According to Renouvier and his followers, to as- 
sert a law" is but to assert an hypothesis. ^'Hypothe- 
ses non fingo/' said wise Sir Isaac Newton. By 
all means let us have hypotheses, but let us treat 
them only as inferences and hints and suggestions 
of reality. 

Experience allows us to state a certain number of 
cases where one phenomenon follows precisely upon 
another. The idea occurs to us that these phenom- 
ena may be connected; our experiments show us 
that they appeared together, say, hundreds of times. 
What right have we to conclude that they are, or 
will be, the same always and in all the solar systems 
of the universe? 

To establish such a law, we ought to exhaust all 
possibilities in time and space. Thus when we af- 



16 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

firm the truth of a law, we are not content with 
hazarding a conjecture; we boldly declare that we 
believe the world owes immediate and irrevocable 
obedience to our hypothesis. 

The genesis of our ideas, or rather of our certi- 
tude, according to Renouvier, is rather alarming for 
browbeating people. It is our will which sets to 
itself a certain goal, and when the goal is attained, 
our mind dwells thereafter in happy certitude. Thus 
I should say we pin our faith to determinism, because 
the spiritualistic doctrine, for some personal motive, 
irritates us ; and we believe the laws of nature to be 
absolutely binding for ever and everyv\^here, because, 
from a personal motive, we have faith in determin- 
ism. 

Our every-day expressions, if we paid more heed 
to them, would show us such processes of our mind. 
We ^^give a grudging assent''; we ^^ surrender to 
evidence"; we ^^ submit to reason" — all of which 
phrases clearly manifest the part our will plays in 
our very act of believing. 

Science and philosophy tell us that our sensations 
are part of ourselves : the same might be said of our 
beliefs. Doubtless we are not conscious of such a 
phenomenon. To know that there is a subjective 
element in our creed might discourage many of us. 
And yet when we remember how many more men 
have been killed by bigotry than by skepticism, we 
may congratulate ourselves upon having learned, 
if not to respect and love our neighbor, at least to 
refrain from sending him to the stake. Besides, we 
are natural believers. Therefore, Renouvier and 
Secretan are not so audacious as might first appear. 
All they really want to say can be summed up in 
these words of Secretan: **I1 n'y a pas de preuve de 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 17 

Texistence de Dieu: Dieu n'est pas Pobjet d'une 
science, mais d'une foi.^'* 

We are on the way to pragmatism. In order to 
believe, a man must first become a skeptic. The 
Pyrrhonisms alley leads to the temple. The best 
argument in favor of Renouvier's theory may be 
drawn from the attitude of such different philoso- 
phers as Malebranche and Renan. Both believe ab- 
solutely that **Dieu n'agit pas dans le monde par 
des volontes particulieres, ' ' that is, by miracles ; yet 
Malebranche was a fervent Catholic, and Renan 
a pronounced skeptic! Our philosophical theories 
lead us only whither we allow them to lead us : the 
mind is the heart's servant. 

The force of Renouvier's argument (which is also 
Secretan's) in favor of our liberty is apparent. The 
determinist denies our free will only because he 
believes in principles which appeal to him. 

* ^ Temperaments with their cravings and refusals 
do determine men in their philosophies and always 
will,'' says William James.f And as Pascal pro- 
foundly remarks, **The will is one of the chief fac- 
tors of belief; not that it creates belief, but because 
things are true or false according to the aspect in 
which we look at them. The will which prefers one 
aspect to another turns away the mind from consid- 
ering the qualities of all that it does not like to see. ' ' 
That is the best formula for what happens in spiri- 
tual matters ; a reasoning is only likely to persuade 
us if we give it our attention, if we adopt it as our 
own. But Renouvier goes much further than Pascal. 
** Whoever wants to believe will believe," he assures 

*Cf. Secretan, La Civilisation et la croyance. Cf. also Renouvier, 
La Nouvelle Monadologie, ou Deuxieme Essai de Critique generate. 
\ Pragmatism, p. 35. 



18 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

us in Ms Deuxieme Essai de Critique Generate; and 
Secretan uses almost the same language. Believe 
what your conscience tells you is true. You can do 
so. Desire your belief, for you can believe at will. 
Will is an inexhaustible spring of action; you have 
only to turn the tap. Such, according to Eenouvier, 
is the foundation of man's liberty, which is the same 
thing as sincerity. *^To thine own self be true'* is 
not only the guiding principle of our actions, but also 
that of our most intimate convictions. The things 
of which we are certain are those which we judge 
suitable to our high moral destiny, and this very ap- 
probation is an act of liberty. In this way there 
is a very intimate connection between certitude and 
faith, between faith and will.* 

^'Liberty cannot be demonstrated,'' writes Secre- 
tan; *^ neither can determinism be proved. Moral 
life develops in belief in liberty, science develops in 
belief in the determinist hypothesis. The interests 
of morality plead for liberty, the interests of theo- 
retical science plead for necessity." At its last 
analysis ^determinism affirms a faith, the partisan 
of free will expresses another. The two clash, but 
neither has the right to claim that he has changed 
his faith into knowledge and that he has proved its 
truth." 

Let us go further. We perceive the world through 
senses which deform reality. The result is that how- 
ever intelligible, however coherent, a system may 
appear to us, it proves only one thing, namely, that 
it appears true to our mind, but very probably it is 
in no wise the image of truth. We can admit that 
the inhabitant of Sirius or Neptune or Mars has 

•Anyone wishing to remonstrate may profitably turn to an article 
which appeared in the (London) Times of February 17, 1917, The 
Modern Distrust of Religion. 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 19 

quite a different conception of things, just as the 
ant, the bee, or the dog around us has a view very 
unlike ours. As M, Henri Poincare once put it: 
**Concevez Pesprit humain sous la forme d'une pu- 
naise iniiniment plate et qui se meut sur une sphere 
parfaite, alors le plus court chemin d'un point a 
Pautre sera pour cet esprit, non pas la ligne droite, 
dont il n'a pas Pidee, mais Pare de cercle. Et toutes 
les propositions qui derivent de la ligne droite con- 
sideree comme le plus court chemin d'un point a un 
autre n'auront desormais qu'une valeur humaine, 
qu'une valeur relative/'* 

Thus experiment is powerless to establish irre- 
futably the truth of a law. When we formulate a 
law we translate the nature of our mind rather than 
that of the universe. And thus not only observation 
and experiment are unable to prove rigorously the 
existence of laws, but they can only apply to states 
of consciousness, pure and simple phenomena. How 
can anyone believe that in a summary he holds all 
truth, past, present and future, as one holds a quiv- 
ering bird in one's hand? 

And the conclusion of these remarks might be 
taken from those words of Nietzsche: **It is high 
time to replace the Kantian question, ^How are syn- 
thetic judgments a priori possible?' by another ques- 
tion, *Why is belief in such judgments necessary?' 
In effect, it is high time that we should understand 
that such judgments must be believed to be true, for 
the sake of the preservation of creatures like our- 
selves. Though they still might naturally be false 
judgments! Or, more plainly spoken, and roughly 
and readily — synthetic judgments a priori should 
not *be possible' at all; we have no right to them; 

*Cf. Andre Beaunier, ''Visages d'hier et d'aujourd'hui," Paris, 1911. 
p. 165. 



20 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

in our moutlis they are nothing but false judgments. 
Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, 
as plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to 
the perspective view of life. . . .''* 

This amounts to saying that a philosophy should 
have as its principal aim not knowledge, but ser- 
vice : its end is to make men wish to live. And it is 
in this way that the philosophy of Renouvier and 
Secretan has cleared the way for the pragmatism of 
William James and Professor Schiller and their dis- 
ciples, as well as for M. Bergson's philosophy of 
intuition, and that it has given an added impetus 
to Brunetiere's traditionalism and to M. Barres's 
nationalism. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, 
since this philosophy sang the praises of will, of that 
**dumb conviction that the truth must be in one di- 
rection rather than another. ' ' In spite of the many 
considerable differences between Bergson and Wil- 
liam James, both agree in declaring that life is prior 
to intellect, and that true reality cannot be appre- 
hended save in the living experience itself. On the 
one hand Bergson affirms that intuition, by an effort 
of which we place ourselves from the first in the flow 
of reality, attains the absolute: on the other the 
pragmatists declare that we have only one edition 
of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of 
places, especially in the places where thinking be- 
ings are at work.f 

Both these theorists — starting from widely dif- 
ferent points of view — are alike in their aim at 
plunging us into life *4n order to feel our force and 
also to succeed in intensifying it.'^t 

The doctrine of Bergson is every bit as courage- 

*Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Helen Zimmern, p. 18. 

^Pragmatism, p. 259. 

f'Life and Consciousness^" Bergson. Hihhert Journal, Oct., 1911. 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 21 

ous as that of William James. This in spite of Mr. 
Kallen ^s saying : * ^ For the pragmatist truth is what 
we live by, not what we rest in : with a sly dig at the 
Bergsonians who *rest in the absolute.' '^ M. Berg- 
son has rightly protested against such an interpreta- 
tion of his teaching. We should not forget that Wil- 
liam James said of Bergson, ^^ Reading his books 
is what has made me hold.^^ Far more important 
than theories is a man's attitude. Doubtless Mr. 
Kallen is right when he says, *^For James experi- 
ence is all, each piece of it hanging to the other 
by its edges, and the whole, self-containing, hang- 
ing on nothing''; whilst for Bergson life tran- 
scends experience, and his philosophy with its 
famous elan vital implies pure metaphysical sub- 
strata. 

But the man in the street is not going to try to 
fathom mystical utterances. He is perfectly impious 
in his skepticism of theory; and his sound common 
sense asks only: what is truth, according to these 
philosophers ? 

Now for Bergson and for James the true idea is 
the idea ivhich pays. No doubt M. Bergson will not 
express himself in such a brutal way. His philoso- 
phy has mellowed into metaphysics. The pure air 
of French culture has sweetened the tough and hard 
nature of pragmatism. But his philosophy, which 
looks on matter as the enemy, which takes account 
of ^* values," and is content with no doctrine which 
ignores them, is a philosophy of earnest belief in 
sincerity, in freedom, in unselfish greatness. 

We hear on one side James shouting from his pul- 
pit : * ^ The possession of true thoughts means every- 
where the possession of invaluable instruments of 
action;"* and on the other Bergson whispers in our 

^Pragmatism, p. 202. 



22 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

ear, **T]ie Universe is the battle-ground between 
freedom and necessity.'' 

For both of them true philosophy is philanthropy 
which does not squander its golden words in self- 
laudation, but invests them in the human heart. The 
gist of such doctrine is to force us into becoming 
what we are capable of becoming. 

To act is to know, — a deep saying. Hence the 
necessity for training our will ; hence also the neces- 
sity for training our hearts. **I therefore for one 
cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules 
for truth seeking,'' James writes, and his will to 
believe has already worked wonders. There is no 
such insurmountable barrier as determinism. It is 
a poor mind that does not see the means to fly over 
it. Naturalism says, ^ ' Tell me what your surround- 
ings are and I will tell you who you are. ' ' But true 
realism replies, ^^Tell me what you are and I will 
tell you what your surroundings will be."* 

On the whole, art and literature have created our 

*The Philosophy of William James, by Thomas Flournoy, pro- 
fessor in the faculty of Sciences at the University of Geneva (author- 
ized translation by Edwin B. Holt and William James, Jr.), is a 
very important work for those who wish to understand James's phi- 
losophy and to differentiate it from that of Secretan, Renouvier and 
Bergson. Pp. 191-196 are full of recollections: the philosophic tone 
is laid aside. They include a letter from James to Flournoy con- 
cerning Renouvier and Secretan. "I entirely agree," he writes, 
"that Renouvier's system fails to satisfy, but it seems to me the 
classical and constant expression of one of the great attitudes, that 
of insisting on logically intelligible formulas. If one goes beyond, 
one must abandon the hope of formulas altogether, which is what 
all pious sentimentalists do; and with them, M. Secretan, since 
he fails to give any articulate substitute for the criticism he finds 
so unsatisfactory. Most philosophers give formulas, and inadmis- 
sible ones, as when Secretan makes a memoire sans oubli =r duratio 
tota simul = eternity!" (p. 125; see also Flournoy's interesting 
remarks). Clearly William James early tired of formulas and the 
hollow rationalistic method and threw himself whole-heartedly into 
radical empiricism, because he had given up all hope of understand- 
ing the world in a logical way. (See The Will to Believe, New 
York, 1903, p. 29.) 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 23 

milieu. We come back to Whistler ^s reply to tlie 
lady who remarked that a certain sunset reminded 
her of one of his pictures: ^'Ah! Madam, Nature 
is looking up!'' In the glorious manifestations of 
a free art, as they are shown by the masterpieces of 
a Michelangelo, or a Beethoven, we see, according 
to Bergson, the final reality of the universe. John 
Stuart Mill's father was a pragmatist, or a Berg- 
sonian avant la lettre. ^^He was fond of putting 
into my hands books which exhibited men of energy 
and resource in unusual circumstances struggling 
against difficulties and overcoming them."* 

Bergson, be it said to his credit, has had an intui- 
tion of the indomitable nature whence we spring. 
His * Vital impetus" is but a device for telling us 
that mankind has a privileged part in the world and 
that we must judge our forefathers from a more 
divine position than that of the mollusk. The an- 
cients had placed perfection in the normal develop- 
ment of our whole being, and Bergson and James 
are classicists in that sense that they put us in an 
heroic heart about life. 

The reader sees now how such preaching reacted 
against the pessimism and maudlin sentimentality of 
a part of French literature. The Romanticists had 
been tootling too long on their trumpets ; the day of 
judgment had not come except for them, and now 
was the time to sound the healthy drum of action. 

II 

A writer very different from Bergson and James, 
Joseph de Maistre, had said a long time before them : 
*^Man ought to act as if he were able to do every- 

*John Stuart Mill. AutoUography, p. 5. Longmans Green & Co., 
1908. 



24 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITEES 

thing, and submit as if lie could do nothing/' The 
name of this very interesting thinker brings us natu- 
rally to the doctrine of M. Brunetiere, for M. Bru- 
netiere has done little else than repeat and perfect 
the ideas of Joseph de Maistre ; but he has halted at 
many stages on the road to religion. No scholar has 
worked harder at finding truth ; and a very tempest 
of passion fills his pilgrim mantle as he wanders 
about. He has been called a man of formulae, and 
certainly no man was more tossed by the storms of 
his country; nor has any man listened with more 
attentive ear to the countless thronging echoes of 
the present times. At one moment, Comte was his 
god, at another, Darwin his idol. But his so-called 
failures only steeled his great heart; they were the 
harbingers of his final triumph. His Discours de 
Combat are not only an exposition of the view that 
science is incapable of offering an explanation or 
even an acceptable interpretation of the universe, 
but also a proof of the real courage of this purveyor 
of thought for young "normaliens.'^ For a long 
time he believed in science, and then experience, the 
very fact that human nature demands a moral code, 
taught him that all he had written so far was not the 
real thing. Instead of pursuing the same course as 
many men, when their prior actions prove too strong 
and enslave them, Brunetiere started afresh, when 
well over forty, and dwelt, as his wont was, on the 
truth he had discovered. Those who knew him tell 
us that his moral suffering was great ; nor was that 
all, — his religious attitude hindered his university 
career, and he was never appointed professor at the 
College de France, as he had had every right to ex- 
pect. I cannot read his Discours de Combat with- 
out imagining Brunetiere, like a Greek hero, draw- 
ing his wounds, while he cries in a lusty voice : * * On 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 25 

ne se debarrasse pas du besoin de croire. II est 
ancre dans le coeur de Phomme/' And Ms fighting 
eloquence, ever wielding lance and shield, challenges 
contest. *^I1 y a de vieilles idees dont la vie de Phu- 
manite ne saurait pas plus se passer que de pain.'* 
Who said that the wise skeptic is a bad citizen? Such 
is Brunetiere's opinion. And truly if those old-fash- 
ioned ideas, as Renan used to call them, morality, 
love of family, love of fatherland, self-sacrifice, all 
the generous possibilities, waver for a moment, the 
whole social structure totters, and the skeptic him- 
self is hurled into bottomless confusion. Brunetiere 
is the intellectual nephew of Bossuet, and in his eyes 
the speaker's art is truly a sacred thing. But there 
again his spirit of adventure (I should like to un- 
derline that, for Brunetiere appears to many readers 
as a kind of scarecrow, old before he was through 
his teens), his spirit of adventure, then, made him 
realize that the most up-to-date things are common- 
places, the daily bread of the mind's life, the sub- 
stance and fabric of our moral existence. Job's 
complaint is ever fresh and new ; he struck the deep- 
est note and the most familiar; yet all our fine aes- 
thetes of yesterday, with their sickly, puling rigma- 
role and hysterical sadness, are now and for ever 
forgotten. Real culture can be told not by the num- 
ber of books which have been read, nor by any won- 
derful and multicolored sensations, nor by kinemat- 
ographic emotions, nor by far-fetched sentimentality, 
but by depth of feeling and sincerity. Brunetiere's 
speeches are like those old Dutch pictures which are 
so extraordinarily bracing in their solidity and sto- 
lidity. It was a grand thing to busy yourself with 
pots and pans like those old Flemish women, with 
your face turned towards real life. 

From this point of view Brunetiere's work sym- 



26 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

bolizes a whole phase in the history of modern con- 
temporary thought. If he fights so desperately 
against individualism, it is because the individualist 
is an obstacle to social life. The egotist leads one 
merely to a cul de sac. M. Brunetiere is his antago- 
nist, and the apostle of the two religions — the cult 
of the dead and worship of the fatherland. **La tra- 
dition, '^ he says, ^^pour nous ce n'est pas ce qui est 
mort, c^est au contraire ce qui vit; c'est ce qui survit 
du passe dans le present, c'est ce qui depasse Pheure 
actuelle; et de nous tons, tant que nous sommes, ce 
ne sera pour ceux qui viendront apres nous, que ce 
qui vivra plus que nous. ' ' And he goes on to show 
how this survival of the past unites with the future. 
*^Non seulement la religion n'a rien d 'incompatible 
avec le progres, mais au contraire le vrai progres, 
le progres durable n'est possible qu'en accordance 
avec la tradition, et par le moyen de la tradition. ' ' 

The curious thing is that this hatred of individual- 
ism led Brunetiere to his traditionalism, while an- 
other great writer, M. Maurice Barres, has become a 
traditionalist on account of his individualism. 

M. Barres firmly believes that our personality at- 
tains its full development only when it is in con- 
formity with the tradition of our race, and that our 
life expands and gains in breadth when it draws its 
strength from the soil of our own country. It is 
through excess of individualism that Barres cher- 
ishes the belief that the best part of our dead lives 
again in us, and he has developed this idea with 
great subtlety and poetic power in most of his books. 

It is really most interesting to see two minds so 
widely different arrive at the same conclusion. 
Barres 's influence, I should think, has been the 
greater of the two. His works, because they are 
works of fiction, appeal to a larger public. They are 



CONTEMPORAEY FRENCH THOUGHT 27 

not only true to the human tragi-comedy, but 
through all the pages there blows the wind of a high 
way of feeling which places Colette BaudocJie on a 
level with the great masterpieces of French litera- 
ture. 

By the side of Barres and Brunetiere, I should like 
to place a younger man, an essayist like Barres, a 
genuine investigator in the realm of thoughts like 
Brunetiere. M. Andre Beaunier's novels, V Homme 
qui a perdu son moi (1911) and la Revolts 
(1914), have been widely read in France, and his 
literary criticisms in the Figaro and in Revue des 
Deux Mondes manifest a caustic humor and a sil- 
very sensitiveness which at times remind the reader 
of Charles Lamb. Beaunier's recollections of his 
childhood* remind the reader of Old China, for with 
him as with Lamb the desire of depicting himself is 
his real motive for writing. 

M. Beaunier belongs, I should say, to that extraor- 
dinary generation of 1880 (or is it 1895?) intoxi- 
cated with all ideas and above all with symbolism, 
and of course in love with the German subjective 
idealism, as well as with Dante and the primitive 
Italian painters. His friends might have feared, at 
a certain moment of his life, that his ever changing 
and protean mind would never enjoy the cosy ingle- 
nook of firm belief; and the philistine often won- 
dered whether so irrepressible an epigrammatist 
were not laughing at his reader and even at himself. 
His book Trois Amies de Chateaubriand scandalized 
all those simple folk who take themselves — and 
Chateaubriand — too seriously. Truly a chef won- 
derfully well versed in the delicate art of tickling 
the jaded Parisian appetite with the cool malignity 

*See Andre Beaunier, des I dees et des Hommes. Deuxieme Serie. 
Paris, 1915. 



28 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

of highly seasoned criticism: plenty of cayenne 
among the bays of laurel for the subjects of his 
studies ; and yet behold this humorist, the least nar- 
row-minded, dogmatic or intolerant of men, become 
now a stern moralist, what his enemies would call 
a formalist, a limited man! Is this yet another of 
the jester's tricks? Far from it. He has become a 
great believer, and the fact that he may express his 
faith in a skeptic tone of voice, or in peculiar turns 
of phrase, only proves the strength of this faith. 

There is an entertaining scene, pregnant with 
meaning, in his book La Revolted which leaves us in 
no doubt as to M. Beaunier's state of mind: I mean 
the conversation between the young heroine and the 
professor of philosophy. M. Darbenne-Mincenot is 
evidently what M. Beaunier was himself once upon a 
time, the philosopher convinced that everything un- 
dulates and flows, the tired Pyrrhonist who, realiz- 
ing the abyss between man and his performance, re- 
fuses to act and spends his life between sleeping 
and yawning in the easy chair of skepticism. The 
vivid portrayal of this modern professor of philo- 
sophy is a good indication of the light in which M. 
Beaunier looks at him today. He snaps his fingers 
in the face of such cui-hono philosophy. In the hun- 
dreds of books in M. Darbenne-Mincenot 's library, 
life is nothing but a spiritualized, deformed and ab- 
stract person sprung fully armed from the minds of 
thinkers, a scheme pure and simple built upon pre- 
conceived ideas, devoid of justness and proportion. 
Would to God that it were only a chimcera bomhi- 
nans in vacuo! 

M. Beaunier, by admitting the relativity of things, 
has been led to realize that human strength and wis- 
dom lie not in extreme dogmatism, in believing true 
some empty dream or doubtful operation of the 



CONTEMPOEARY FRENCH THOUGHT 29 

mind, but in avoiding extremes. *^Man is neither 
angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he 
who would act the angel, acts the brute.'' And M. 
Beaunier, from the day when he understood that lit- 
erature meant for him the picture of life freed from 
all the shackles of life (shall we say under the influ- 
ence of Bergson?), when he understood that a novel 
must above all be full of true humor, wrote his two 
masterpieces, V Homme qui a perdu son moi, and la 
Revolte. It may be that the atmosphere therein is 
cold or even cruel, too intellectually exciting; but, 
then, M. Beaunier has little pity for mankind led 
astray by knaves or fools. 

Beside M. Beaunier should be placed the brilliant 
dramatist, Francois de Curel, who shows us very 
clearly what is the soul of the contemporary move- 
ment. His best known play, la Nouvelle Idole, was 
first performed in 1899 ; but at that time the French 
public, accustomed as it was to live in full blooded 
and complacent paganism, delighting in the verbal 
orgies of the Theatre litre or the coarse cynicism of 
Boulevard theatres, was hardly ready to appreciate 
this new venture. In 1914 and 1915 the play was re- 
vived and, thanks to the shadows cast by war, met 
with the success it deserved. The whole point of the 
play is its question : has a savant the right to sacri- 
fice to science human lives already condemned by 
fate? Frangois de Curel, an aristocrat in irony and 
independence of mind, saw the tendency of the time 
to worship science, the New Idol, and challenged it. 
He represents a real wave of French feeling such 
as is rarely perceived by the outsider who has not 
lived many years in the depths of a French province 
— such feeling as Montaigne has so admirably por- 
trayed when speaking of the stoicism of his poor 
neighbors. * * Quand il s 'agit de ne pas crever comme 



30 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITEES 

un chien, mais de finir noblement, c'est encore aupres 
des humbles qui adorent Dieu et des coeurs ardents 
qui vivent avec ton heroisme que les pMlosoplies ont 
a cherclier des legons de logique.''* 

We now come naturally to Jules Lemaitre and 
Emile Faguet. Although Faguet and Lemaitre be- 
long to another generation than Curel or Beaunier 

— since Faguet was born in 1847 and Lemaitre in 
1853 — the history of their so-called evolution 
throws light upon the frame of mind of Curel or 
Beaunier. The student of French literature sees 
the same idea taking hold of the mind of so many 
different men between 1890 and 1910, here remaining 
a sentiment, there tending to become a fixed idea, 
almost a law, that he is bound to believe in that doc- 
trine of compensation so dear to Emerson's heart. 
It was at the moment when anarchy was at its high- 
water mark in France, under the name of intellec- 
tualism, that all these men rose up and declared that 
they would not be so misgoverned any longer. 

The more I read Jules Lemaitre — and about him 

— the more convinced I am that his conversion was 
a case of patriotism pure and simple. Every grain 
of his wit went to counterbalance every grain of 
his adversaries' folly, solely and simply because he 
loved his Orleanais. Anatole France in his Vie lif- 
teraire quotes a beautiful page of Jules Lemaitre 
which goes far to explain the author of Opinions a 
repandre or the fact of his becoming President de la 
Patrie frangaise. 

**Quand j'entends declamer sur Pamour de la pa- 
trie, je reste froid, je renfonce mon amour en moi- 
meme avec jalousie pour le derober aux banalites de 
la rhetorique qui en feraient je ne sais quoi de faux, 
de vide et de convenu. Mais quand j'embrasse de 

*La Nouvelle Idole, last scene. 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 31 

quelque courbe de la rive, la Loire etalee et bleue 
comme un lac, avec ses prairies, ses peupliers, ses 
ilots blonds, ses touffes d 'osiers bleuatres, son ciel 
leger, la douceur epandue dans Pair, et non loin 
dans ce pays aime de nos anciens rois, quelque cha- 
teau cisele comme un bijou qui me rappelle la vieille 
France, ce qu'elle a ete dans la monde, alors je me 
sens pris d'une infinie tendresse pour cette terre ma- 
ternelle ou j 'ai partout des racines si delicates et si 
fortes/'* 

If the masterpieces of sculpture and painting are 
a fine education (and nobody denies it), why should 
not beautiful nature — majestic old oaks, a stately 
river, the play of shadows on rock and cave, grace- 
ful hills stretching their delicate limbs against an 
opal sunset, stars seen at night through the branches 
of a group of cypresses, birches white and moving 
gently in the breeze like a band of nymphs — why 
should not this most classical landscape exert an en- 
during influence upon a sensitive mind? Lemaitre 
was born to be a gentleman farmer. He is a part of 
the soil of France. Every real French gentleman is. 

Emile Faguet on the other hand is a citadin, the 
child of cities, and his world is the world of ideas. 
Just as in the soul of the artist there exists some- 
thing more delicate, more sensitive, than in the aver- 
age man which enables him to understand and feel 
beauty in its deepest sense, so M. Faguet 's mind 
has an exquisite finesse, a subtle and spiritual scale, 
that enables him to weigh, reject or accept the gold 
or dross of ideas. Hence the creation of his books, 
above all of his three volumes on the moralists and 
political writers of the Nineteenth Century. 

* ' It is to the eternal honor of man, ' ' he once wrote, 
**that a hundred thousand facts shall never prevail 

*Vie Litteraire, Seme serie, p. 154. 



32 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

over one idea.'* Still, lover of ideas does not mean 
an ideologist. No man was ever fonder of facts than 
Faguet. If lie took no active part in public affairs, 
he mixed freely with men and even with houlevar- 
diers — that is what gives him a certain sense of 
reality and an unfailing sense of humor. The book 
he called Political Questions might just as well be 
named Social Maladies, and should be the vade me- 
cum of our present-day statesmen. *^ Science, to 
whom all men turned to find happiness, has created 
a rough, violent, terribly agitated and panting 
world.'* M. Faguet wrote those words before the 
great war ; and in their light one would fain inquire : 
What manner of German did science make ? 

This world which is so tired, so drunken with un- 
satisfied desires, this feverish, restless plutocracy 
powerless to find happiness, cannot exist indefinitely 
without a moral and intellectual ideal. 

It was in order to feel under him the solid ground 
of fact that Faguet devoted all his talent in the lat- 
ter part of his life to social problems. He stands 
in that respect for an epitome of all those men of 
letters who wish to see clearly the problem not of 
destiny, but of their own destiny. As he said so well, 
**L'avenir national est une chose autrement impor- 
tante que Pavenir litteraire. ' ' That is why he wrote 
his Culte de ^Incompetence, and his VHorreur des 
Responsabilites, and so many articles in so many 
papers. 

Ill 

Now M. Faguet is, more than anyone else, a repre- 
sentative of all those men of letters who, however 
original they may be, are the product rather than 
the creators of a movement. Side by side with philo- 
sophers such as Eenouvier, and great authors such 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 33 

as Barres, who are capable in themselves of origi- 
nating a movement and being its fountain heads, 
there are all those talented writers who, while they 
undergo the influence of ideas which are in the air 
at the moment, at the same time give them a fresh 
impulse. This reactionary revival which we are now 
considering was begun as early as 1885 and by quite 
young writers. 

Critics in general make a great mistake when they 
pay attention only to the middle-aged — to those 
men who have already made their way and won their 
reputations. It is young men who create new move- 
ments. They are like children who spread abroad 
the beauty they carry within themselves and are 
rebellious towards any influence which goes against 
their grain. Most of us have noticed the imitative- 
ness of the child, but few have stopped to admire his 
act of self-defense, his instinctive combativeness, 
nay, his self-reliance and desire to innovate, his art 
of improvisation, of creative play. A child has a 
magnetic nature in subtle relation with the forces of 
the earth: like the morning sun, he shows us the 
right way by his profound and resistless sincerity. 
The real business of the critic is to know what the 
young men are about. In the present case he must 
consult the Parisian reviews of 1895 to 1900 in order 
to realize what were the ideas which swayed the 
young writers of that time. Before the appearance 
of the Mercure de France, which is the m,ost impor- 
tant repertory, and which is to-day more vigorous 
than ever, there were the RevUe Contemporaine, la 
Vogue, la Revue Independante, and above all the 
Revue Wagnerienne. 

The Revue Wagnerienne which was founded in 
1885 by Edouard Dujardin and on the staff of which 
J. K. Huysmans met Catulle Mendes, Teodor de 



34 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

Wyzewa, L. de Fourcaud, etc., is a very good in- 
dication of Grerman influence in France. Teodor 
de Wyzewa, together with CatuUe Mendes, was the 
great apostle of Wagner. 

His book, Nos MaUres, in which he has repub- 
lished articles which had appeared between 1885 and 
1895 in the Revue Wagnerienne, la Vogue, la Revue 
Independante, la Revue hleue, le Figaro, le Mercure 
de France, is valuable for the Wagnerian enthusiasm 
which it breathes. This extraordinarily brilliant 
young Pole worships Wagner as the prophet of a 
new order of things. But of course the high priest 
of all these young men seeking to renew the inspira- 
tion of the arts is Baudelaire, who, as far back as 
1861 in his famous study of Eichard Wagner and 
Tannhduser, had proclaimed that this music was the 
expression of all that is most hidden in the heart of 
man. 

Together with this influence of Wagner must be 
taken that of Villiers de PIsle Adam, an influence 
so important that it merits a chapter to itself. He 
reinforced the influence of Germany by the very fact 
that he expressed Hegelian and Wagnerian ideas in 
intelligible French. 

Finally, it would be neglecting the expression of 
the time that will perhaps live longest if we neg- 
lected the painters; such men as Puvis de Cha- 
vannes, Gustave Moreau, Besnard, AVhistler, Cazin, 
Maurice Denis, all of whom aim at expressing the 
human soul rather than externals and who appeal 
to our feelings rather than to our eyes. The pleas- 
ures of the eye are for them an end, but not the su- 
preme end: they seek rather to awaken by means 
of these pleasures the profound emotion created in 
us by fine music and sublime poetry. Indeed, every- 
things holds together; the world of art, the world of 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 35 

ideas, and the world of life act and react one 
upon another; and were it not for the miraculous 
action of genius, or of faith interrupting the chain 
of cause and effect, upsetting our little schemes, we 
should be tempted to believe in a universal deter- 
minism. Art itself, which is pure intuition, entire 
spontaneity, utterly free from self-consciousness, 
every now and then submits to the influence of 
environment. 

Proudhon, in his book, du Principe de Vart et de 
sa Destination sociale, when studying the work of 
Courbet, declares: *^This critical, analytical, syn- 
thetic, humanitarian painter is an expression of his 
time. His work coincides with Comte^s PJiilosophie 
positive, with Vacherot's Metaphysique positive, and 
with my own le Droit humain ou Justice immanente; 
the right to work and the rights of the workman, 
proclaiming the end of capitalism and the sover- 
eignty of labor; the phrenology of Gall and Spurz- 
heim ; the physiognomy of Lavater. ' * Proudhon was 
right when he spoke in this way of Courbet, who 
was a great artist but a shallow mind. But it was 
precisely against the excesses of this realistic school 
of painting that Gustave Moreau rebelled. ** Je ne 
crois ni a ce que je touche, ni a ce que je vois : je ne 
crois qu'a ce que je ne vois pas, et a ce que je sens.'' 
It might even be said of this mystic painter with his 
passion for the invisible, his curiosity about the most 
elusive expressions of the human soul, ever seeking 
an emotion by means of philosophic speculation, that 
he forestalls the philosophy of Bergson. It would 
of course be highly imprudent to insist upon such a 
slippery point — painting and literature being arts 
which employ different means, treat different sub- 
jects, and appeal to different faculties of our minds. 
Impressionism is not only a study and evocation of 



36 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

modern life, but a study of light, sunlight, starlight 
— even gaslight. It has given us the sunshine of 
Monet, the footlights of Degas, the open air of Ma- 
net, and also Whistler's nocturnes. Again, the im- 
pressionists were influenced by other artists, and 
not by men of letters : Daumier, Gavarni and Guys 
were their real masters. 

Far more important factors than impressionism 
were at work: the progressive suppression of aver- 
age fortunes, due to the steady decrease of income 
and increased cost of living; the growing predomi- 
nance of the plutocracy and steady weakening of 
moral forces; the progress of socialism and of an- 
archy among men of letters culminating in the words 
of a French poet, Laurent Tailhade, '^Qu'importe le 
sort de vagues humanites, pourvu que le geste soit 
beauT'* In any case the bourgeoisie was tak- 
ing more and more interest in labor questions: 
and that is the explanation of the influence of 
Eussian writers which was so widely felt at this 
moment, the sudden leaping into fame of Tolstoi 
and Dostoiewski. In 1886 appeared M. Melchior 
de Vogiie's le Roman russe. The book was made 
up of a series of articles which had appeared in 
the Revue des Deux Mondes, with a preface which 

*See Documents d'etudes sociales, sur I'Anarchie, par Alexandre 
Berard, Lyon, 1897. 

"II faut rendre k chacun ce qui lui est d<i: or, il est bien certain 
qui si I'anarchie a pris le developpement qu'elle a pris, on le doit 
k une certaine presse boulevardiere, aux nevroses et aux sceptiques 
de la capitale, qui ont vu dans la nouvelle ecole une nouveaut^ 
curieuse et dans ses theories des piments pour leurs sens blasts. 
Ce n'est point, en effet, parmi les misereux que I'anarchie a fait 
le plus d'adeptes, mais bien parmi les declaases qui errent, sans 
metier determine; ce n'est point parmi les travailleurs en blouse 
qu'elle a recrut^ ses soldats, mais parmi les rates aux redingotes 
rapees; Emile Henry et Vaillant etaient de cette categoric. Que 
Toulez-vous? des publicistes comme M. Laurent Tailhade cel^braient 
la heoAite du geste, et des duchesses etaient pleines de sympathie pour 
les compagnons de la dynamite." (Page 4.) 



CONTEMPORAEY FRENCH THOUGHT 37 

created a sensation since it proclain^ed the bank- 
ruptcy of naturalism, the disgust of the naturalistic 
novel, and perhaps the fear felt by the bourgeoisie 
at this socialism which the Russians had created. 
Raskolnikotf^s words to Sonia, **It is not before 
you that I prostrate myself, but before all the suf- 
fering of mankind, '^ words which carried the French 
mind so far away from the art-for-art school, were 
taken as a watchword by those men who felt op- 
pressed, as it were, by the glory of Flaubert and 
Zola, or who wished to ingratiate themselves with 
democracy. The Revue Contemporaine proclaimed 
the glory of the Russians and set the ball rolling so 
well that M. Andre Snares 's articles on the Russian 
novelists in les Cahiers de la Quinzaine many years 
later oifer a good example of the way in which good 
will may develop into enthusiasm. 

At the same time English influence was also at 
work, and little has been said on this subject in any 
just or thorough fashion. Ever since the time of 
Voltaire and Montesquieu French minds have been 
preoccupied with England; in the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury a veritable anglomania reigned among the up- 
per classes, as the many English words incorporated 
into the French vocabulary prove. While the Eng- 
lish jockey and the English tailor were conquering 
the boulevards, and Longchamps and Auteuil, such 
critics as Philarete Chasles, Emile Montegut and, 
above all, Taine, were popularizing English litera- 
ture in the salons. Then very soon Darwin's book 
was to be found in every library. Carlyle, of whom 
Taine had made a masterly study as early as 1864, 
had a still greater influence between 1887 and 1900, 
and numerous translations and enthusiastic studies 
of his works were published. The ever alert French 
mind quickly realized that Carlyle was really ^*the 



38 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

founder of modern irrationalism'' as Chesterton has 
called him. The young Frenchman of that time 
wanted poetical and symbolic novels; he was very 
eager to idolize something, and Carlyle came at the 
right moment, providing him with certain symbols, 
and above all with that imaginative power which 
awakens the intelligence, and sets the molecules of 
the brain a-dancing like the stars in the sky. Hia 
influence was all the greater in that his medium was 
history, and he was thus free from the blemish of 
the novelist who cuts out bits here and there in life 
and makes up a garment in his own fashion which 
is often as strange as Harlequin's coat. It is inter- 
esting to note that the wide success of Mr. Balfour's 
Foundations of Belief (translated by G. Art, with a 
preface by M. Brunetiere) was in part due to the 
influence of Carlyle in France. George Eliot and 
Mrs. Browning were also widely read. 

This Eussian and English influence is well seen in 
such works as Paul Margnieritte 's Jours d^Epreuve 
(1888), la Force des Choses (1891), la Tourmente 
(1893) ; Edouard Eod's le Sens de la vie (1889), la 
Vie privee de Michel Teissier (1894) ; Paul Bour- 
get's le Disciple (1889). It appears at its highest 
in Paul Desjardin's famous le Devoir present 
(1892), a book which marks an epoch. 

At the same time other forces, those of the 
**Poetes Maudits,'' were triumphing in literature; 
and the curious thing is that, far from hindering 
the movement we are considering, they helped it on 
its way. The same wind that blew over the heavily 
scented streets of Paris, haunted by Verlaine, Eim- 
baud and their peers, filled the sails of the idealist 
ship. Paul Verlaine, repentant, absolved, yet still 
a great sinner, ending his days in the workhouse, a 
great poet who sings as men pray and who has writ- 



CONTEMPORAEY FEENCH THOUGHT 39 

ten some of the most profoundly religious poetry 
of the Nineteenth Century — its Villon in fact — 
Verlaine still appeals to the young writers of France. 
Witness this passage from Frangois Mauriac's V En- 
fant charge de chaines, a novel published just before 
the war: **Jean Paul va doucement cherchant les 
allees solitaires. H se forge un ideal de vie grave et 
serieuse, une vie toute pleine de religion et d 'in- 
quietudes d'ordre social. Une chanson accompagne, 
en sourdine sa reverie; quoiqu'elle chante dans son 
coeur, il Pentend distincte et comme eparse dans 
Pair. C'est la chanson du pauvre Verlaine assagi: 

'Elle dit la voix reconnue 
Que la bont6 c'est notre vie, 
Que de la haine et de I'envie 
Rien ne reste, la mort venue. . . .'" 

Nor must we forget Huysmans, that Flemish cari- 
caturist who somehow strayed into the Nineteenth 
Century, with all the power of his extraordinarily 
expressive style, and whose influence has not even 
yet been counteracted ; nor Eimbaud to whom Clau- 
del partly attributes the cause of his own return 
to faith.* 

Then there is M. Teodor de Wyzewa, author of 
V albert y Contes Chretiens, and les Disciples d' Em- 
mails. V albert is a pure masterpiece, little read, it 
is true, but none the less a masterpiece. Ma Tante 
Vincentine is a kind of edition de luxe of Dickens 
for the use of pious souls, with a thread of St. Fran- 
cis running through it. If modern criticism were 
really worth its salt, it would long ago have hailed 
as one of the finest biographies of the last fifteen 
years this story of a ^^poor relation'' living with her 
poor relatives, this picture of a saint's life, **crea- 

•See CEuvrea de Arthur Rimhaud, Preface de Paul Claudel, Paris, 
1912. 



40 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

ture toute pleine de chansons.'^ She knew all tlie 
stories of Poland, and hope, charity, fortitude and 
gladness ever flowed from her lips into the heart 
of her young nephew. Her beautiful soul was Wy- 
zewa^s first teacher and he has fully acknowledged 
his debt: ^^Ce que ces contes m'ont appris, toutes 
les paroles resteraient impuissantes a Pevaluer 
justement. lis ont fagonne pour tou jours mon coeur 
et mon cerveau, m'impregnant a la fois des senti- 
ments que nulle experience ulterieure de la realite 
bourgeoise ne devait plus parvenir a etouffer en 
moi et d'une foule de notions, de principes essentiels, 
qui allaient constituer desormais, si je puis dire, le 
fondement secret de ma ^philosophie.' Ce sont eux, 
ces contes de mon enfance, qui m'ont enseigne a 
admettre toujours la possibilite des choses impos- 
sibles, a me defier de toute pretendue science impo- 
sant des limites arbitraires aux faits, sous pretexte 
de 4ois^ et a tenir pour etrangement incomplete et 
indigente la realite de nos sensations presentes en 
regard de celle de nos libres reves/' 

Putting aside all questions as to the literary or 
philosophic value of this group of books, no one will 
deny that they represent the intellectual evolution 
of a generation which has passed from positivism 
to idealism, from science to the gospel of the humble. 
Obviously, these different writers, who themselves 
are representatives of hosts of others, may take up 
very different attitudes on political and religious 
questions. 

But, dissimilar as they may be, they are alike in 
one thing: they are all convinced that side by side 
with the truth of observable things there is another 
truth. And the history of that Christianity of 
which they are the champions proves them right. 
It was the fishermen of Galilee and not the philoso- 



CONTEMPORAEY FRENCH THOUGHT 41 

pliers of Rome who swayed the crowds and propa- 
gated the faith. Enthusiasm, then, is one of the 
great motive forces of the world. Quantus amor 
tantus animus* 

From all these debates metaphysics emerges with 
added lustre. That is the explanation of the 
present-day rebirth of philosophy. Man's rule of 
conduct cannot depend on any of these sciences 
which Renan used to class among les petites sciences 
conjecturales. Renan said one day: ''Mes nega- 
tions ne sont pas le fruit de Pexegese, elles sont 
anterieures a Pexegese." He meant that if he ac- 
cepted no supernatural story, it was because he con- 
ceived a certain world-system. His refusal of 
belief was due not to the discussion of a text, or 
reading of a manuscript, but to the whole de- 
velopment of his philosophic ^^made in Grermany'* 
thought. 

Scholars who peck away at a text are not proph- 
ets — not even among themselves, since part of 
their time is necessarily devoted to proving the other 
was wrong ; Renan realized that when he said : ^ ^ Le 
propre des etudes historiques et de leurs auxiliaires, 
les sciences philologiques est, aussitot qu 'elles ont 
atteint leur perfection relative, de conunencer a se 
demolir." After all, there is nothing surprising in 
that, w^hen one reflects upon the fashion in which 
the human mind has never ceased building that it 
may destroy, and destroying that it may rebuild 
once more. As Lord Salisbury once said: ^^Few 
men are now influenced by the strange idea that 

*I have not included Charles Maurras in this group of writers 
because, although he ranges himself with the defenders of religion 
and for that very reason might have been classed with Bruneti^re, 
he is a true pagan, a disciple of Anatole France and a founder of 
neo-classicism, which has a holy horror of Bergson and his school. 
His influence has been considerable. — Cf. Faguet: 8hort History of 
French Literature. 



42 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

questions of religious belief depend upon tlie issues 
of physical research. ''* 

In fine, then, let us not be science 's dupe, nor ask 
of her more than she can give. If such is indeed the 
feeling of the younger French writers, then we must 
expect to see poetry reflecting this idealistic evolu- 
tion, — nor shall we be disappointed. We shall see, 
as I hope to show, French poetry rising to new 
heights through a rebirth of the care for the Divine. 

IV 

The general trend of French contemporary 
thought before the war might seem to be a return 
pure and simple to spiritualism, or rather to Pla- 
tonismf (for Plato's Idea is singularly like Berg- 
son's elan vital), were it not that other tendencies, 
essentially original, took shape at the same time, 
harmonizing in a curious way the Bergsonian doc- 
trine Avith the scientific and social activities of the 
times. 

Swedenborg's theory that every soul exists in a 
society of souls is but a poetical myth for the reality 
which exists within us : our feelings and wishes, our 
inspirations and premonitions, issue forth from this 
fertile and all-powerful soil, the unconscious self, so 
long neglected by scientists. Maine de Biran was 
the first genial explorer of these mysterious and 
undiscovered circles of our ego ; and, though Leibnitz 
and Perrault, Barthez, Bichat and Cabanis, had 
hinted at the presence of wild and hidden forces 
within us, Maine de Biran must be considered the 
real leader in this emancipation of the human self 

*Lecture to British Association, 1894. (Oxford Session.) 
tAccording to Plato, Ideas are dynamic forces, shaping matter 
and organizing it, and leading the world to the Beautiful. 



CONTEMPORAEY FEENCH THOUGHT 43 

which, ever strives towards more vitality and 
stronger personality. 

The idea of such a power, wonderful, undefinable, 
even immeasurable, came to certain minds with the 
force of an inspiration ; for such a theory opens out 
wide vistas of hope, long avenues of meditation in 
time and in space, — in time, for in such manifesta- 
tions of the inner soul we are, as it were, thinking 
and talking out of all Eternity, and truly Pascal's 
words have proved to be true when he says, ^^Toute 
la suite des hommes, pendant le cours de tant de 
siecles doit etre consideree comme un meme homme 
qui apprend continuellemenf ; in space, for our 
brain can radiate and act far beyond the limits of 
our organism, and nature becomes thus transparent 
to our new sense. All things are in a flux, and the 
incessant movement of our mind can take us 
through all ages to the very first men who, in a 
great shudder of awe and delight, mingled their soul 
with the Great Power that encomipasses us. Magic 
was nothing but a very deep presentiment of the 
powers of our mental life, which is to the cerebral 
life, to use a Bergsonian metaphor, what a sym- 
phony is to the movements of the conductor's 
baton. 

Numerous nowadays are the writers who have 
launched out on this sea of more or less bewilder- 
ing facts, but whilst Germans busied themselves 
in writing a sort of poetical story of the unknown, 
French philosophers and medical men, such men as 
Theodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, Boirac, Dumas (to 
name only a few), having an extreme impatience of 
metaphysical conjectures, study above all the dis- 
eases of the mind, trying to find the ever elusive 
will-o'-the-wisp of metaphysics, viz., the law or laws 
of psychic phenomena. 



44 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

M. Pierre Janet has more than skirted the borders 
of this world of bewildering depths, and in his 
Automatisme psychologique he goes as far as to say- 
that there are two ways of knowing a phenomenon : 
an impersonal sensation, and a personal perception, 
so that between the personal and clear perception 
and the purely physical state of the body there is 
an intermediary state in which unconscious psycho- 
logical phenomena can exist by themselves and have 
a life of their own. Wordsworth preached formerly 
that we were the passive recipients of external 
influences ; and M. Pierre Janet, when he speaks of 
a patient who recognizes a drawing he has not seen, 
or remembers a movement he has not felt, declares 
that the patient becomes then and there conscious 
of sensations which had seen this drawing or felt 
that movement. (Of. Automatisme Psychologique, 
pp. 313-14.) 

During the last decades biology, sociology, psy- 
chology, have passed from the descriptive to the 
really creative stage, and the old dream of anima 
mundi has reappeared draped in scientific garments. 

We must not, therefore, be astonished to find in 
Matter and Memory M. Bergson supporting his 
thesis with some of M. Eibot's or M. Janet's theo- 
ries, and indeed striking is the resemblance between 
M. Janet's theory of unconscious representation 
and M. Bergson 's fundamental theory of pure mem- 
ory. If you admit unconscious sensations, you 
admit ipso facto that memories exist withiu us 
without our knowing it, and, as M. Bergson says, 
that the past never ceases to exist. So memory is 
no longer a weakened perception, an assembly of 
nascent sensations, but a principle independent of 
matter, a spiritual web woven, as it were, through 
and through our being, bearing with it the integral 



CONTEMPOEARY FRENCH THOUGHT 45 

survival of the past, a miscrocosm more complex 
than all solar systems. All these studies of con- 
scious and unconscious life, of primitive and social 
life, as exemplified in the works of William James, 
of M. Delacroix, or M. Durkheim, have served 
Bergsonism, and culture (for the two go hand in 
hand), not only by real gifts of scientific knowledge, 
but also by suggesting questions which help us to 
realize the dramatic interest of religious life.* 

But at the same time there is another tendency 
of the age: that of a certain skepticism doubting 
even that it doubts, a clever Pyrrhonism declaring 
that mankind, far from resting on the soft pillow 
of nonchalance, must needs live and act, for, if it 
be true that no virtue is final, we must needs live 
and act in order to discover our own ideals. We 
must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again ; 
and there is no hope for any man who is not un- 
settled or even wild. The French mind, weary 
of romantic messianism, sick unto death of all the 
formal schemes for rejuvenating the world, grown 
skeptical after too many political experiences, and 
also ne malin, for some time took a cynical view of 
the universe, but its desire of quickening life, of 
expanding in all directions, could not long delay 
conquering doubt, distrust and pessimism. Mankind 
is a damned rascal, said Anatole France's M. Ber- 
geret, but at the same time he praised Demos, who 
is wiser than we know. 

Now when M. Bergson declared that at times of 
choice we decide without any reason and perhaps 
even against reason, and ^4n certain cases that is 

*We can only refer the reader here to M. Parodi's book, La Philo- 
sophie contemporaine en France, in which the author dwells at length 
on similarity of thought between thinkers as different as M. Durk- 
heim or M. Bergson. 



46 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

the best reason/' the French philosopher was not 
only instructing the children of men to live in to-day, 
but he was emphasizing the doctrine which agreed 
most with the temper of his age: Demos is wild, 
but there is in him a divine vital fire which flickers 
at times but still burns and presently bathes all 
things in an ocean of light. 

M. Jean Weber, in a justly famous article in the 
Revue de Metapliysique et de Morale, took up M. 
Bergson's line, but went further and declared that 
if Fact is to be our new idol, success then justifies 
everything. 

At about the same time Nietzsche's doctrines were 
stirring the Parisian imagination, not of course in 
the nature of a revelation, but as giving a new im- 
portance (for it was ^^made in Germany'') to this 
gospel of Force and success at any cost. Doubtless 
the theory of a superman had fascinated the ro- 
mantic mind, but no writer in the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, before Nietzsche, had taken such delight in 
drawing the picture of a new humanity building 
up its future on the wrecks of a poorer or weaker 
humanity. 

One wonders whether the student of a hundred 
years hence will find matter for astonishment in 
his discovery that such diverse writers as Henri 
Lichtenberger, Jules de Gaultier, Emile Faguet, 
Pierre Lasserre, and Daniel Halevy, study and extol 
a German so cynical and so mordant, so full of self- 
conceit, and that they hand on his sayings with the 
divine truculence of an oracle. Doubtless this same 
student will have already discovered that at the time 
European minds were more than ever dominated by 
the ''libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido domi- 
nendi." *^We are born unjust," says Pascal, **for 
all tends to self." Nietzsche, the last fruit of the 



CONTEMPOEARY FRENCH THOUGHT 47 

Renaissance, the scapegoat in the Great War, is 
essentially anti- Christian: to him Christian morality 
is nothing but hypocrisy, and yet he is singularly 
like Pascal in his lifelong struggle to attain per- 
fection. And this very influence of Pascal reinforces 
that of Nietzsche. Pascal has said: ^^ Being unable 
to make what is just strong, we have made what is 
strong just.'' Nietzsche merely added: ^^Why jus- 
tify what is strong? What is strong is just." Suc- 
cess then is the best policy, and action man's first 
duty. Now, all these writers addressed themselves 
to minds which after wandering through ancient 
and remote civilizations arrived at the declaration 
that no rational, no demonstrable, rules of morality 
exist, since morals are generated as the climate is, 
and vary as the climate does. Health is not only 
the condition of wisdom, but the creator of acts and 
thus of values which by emerging triumphant from 
the struggle for life become the Tables of the Law. 
Such ideas are expressed, for example, by M. Jules 
de Gaultier, whose books are filled with original 
thought and with that force which, according to 
him, participates in the very nature of the world. 
Any theoretical morality is absurd: the love of 
power is the greatest instrument of civilization, 
since it is the desire to acquire command over na- 
ture. This philosophy, more or less disguised in 
M. Jules de Gaultier, is to be found in the writings 
of M. Levy Bruhl, M. Pradines, M. Rauh, and M. 
Chide, and from in between the pages of all their 
volumes peeps the countenance of M. Bergson. The 
same ideas are also to be found in the work of that 
great student of sociology, M. Durkheim. M. Durk- 
heim would not trust conscience out of his sight. 
Conscience is a bad judge of all that takes place 
at the bottom of our being, because it does not pene- 



48 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITEES 

trate there. Moral dicta have value only in so far 
as they demand our adherence from a social point 
of view. Dr. Forneval, in VAnneau d^Amethyste, 
speaks practically the same language. The same 
ideas are to be found more or less hidden in the 
writings of Charles Maurras, frankly developed by 
M. Maurice Barres. Man, being an animal, must 
obey social laws which are strong only in so far as 
they are supported by tradition: by facts or prom- 
ises of facts which heredity has created in us. 

All this worshipping of fact and action would be 
but an anti-intellectualism were it not that all these 
men believe in a cosmos moving by progressive sci- 
entific method and not by leaps or sallies. But at 
the same time it would be amusing and pathetic 
to show how many different doctrines have been born 
of this respect for fact: the most extravagant indi- 
vidualism, and also respect of tradition; integral 
royalism, and also anarchy pure and simple. If the 
secret spring of our action lies never in our intellect 
but in the more intimate unexplored kingdom within 
us, that of the subconscious forces which plunge into 
a mysterious past, poetry as a divine mania rules 
the universe; and it would be more worth while to 
show the pathetic side of such a spectacle — poor 
humanity overwhelmed with the realization of life's 
shortness concentrating all its power in a desperate 
effort to feel and act. 

Another tendency very much akin to the preced- 
ing ones is that seen in the frame of mind of M. 
Georges Sorel, who would have us return to a state 
of society wherein everything would be at the same 
time instinctive and heroic. Apostle of a warlike 
mysticism, M. Sorel professes to be Bergson's dis- 
ciple, and one may wonder whether his inspirations 
are flashes of the Bergsonian spirit in unison with 



CONTEMPOEAEY FRENCH THOUGHT 49 

scientific rationalism, or whether they are simply the 
outcome of the French desire for a quickened sense 
of life. 

In his Reflexions sur la Violence, as well as his 
Illusions du Pr ogres, M. Sorel adopts the Bergsonian 
philosophy viewed from a certain angle in order to 
declare that the proletariat should give free rein to 
its instincts, that revolutionary movement may be 
spontaneous and original in the Bergsonian sense; 
the holy violence of the universal strike pleases his 
bellicose imagination. Never has M. Bergson's 
theory of pure duration been put to such use: for 
this mysticism which believes in a truly holy alli- 
ance between our deeper self and the Power direct- 
ing the Universe, this heroic enthusiasm developed 
by the most absolute disinterestedness, will give 
magnificent impetus to our artistic powers, our joys, 
our enthusiasm, our inventive spirit, all of which 
are at the summit of the scale of human values. Who 
knows whether man, finally free, may not triumph 
even over death? 

But one must not be led to making of the disin- 
terested syndicalist the Bergsonian hero par excel- 
lence. Very few partisans of the universal strike 
have even a nodding acquaintance with Bergson's 
writings. He is merely a name for them, just as- 
Jean Jacques was for so many revolutionarie& 
of 1789. 

Thus on every side we see the extolling of the 
deep self at the expense of the superficial self; it 
is a real revolution in thought, wherein the effort of 
the human mind constantly strives to find itself in 
the presence of the Infinite, and like M. Bergeret 
peopling the universe with seductive forms and sub- 
lime thoughts. If it be true that every philosophic- 
system is the work of its author's temperament,^ it 



50 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

is even more true that every generation collabo- 
rates with its favorite authors. Its great writers, 
philosophers or poets express each in his own way 
what is in embryo at the bottom of the mind of the 
lettered public. Thus, even if we would not go so 
far as accepting the theory dear to M. James and 
M. Boirac,* which would make of our mind some- 
thing spread abroad outside itself and not enclosed 
in a cranium, we must confess that the Press by 
disseminating the ideas of the moment contributes 
towards -making out of the invisible multitude of 
its contemporaries one vast common spirit which 
helps genius to bring forth its inventions. 

*See The Psychology of the Future, by Emile Boirac, translated 
and edited by W. de Kerlor. London, Kegan Paul, Trubuer & Co., 
Ltd. 



HENRI BERGSON 

WE are told that Madame de Stael, one 
evening after dinner, asked the German 
philosopher Fichte to explain his philos- 
ophy to her — ^*4n a few words/' We are not told 
how Fichte answered. We may guess. It was 
really rather foolish of Madame de Stael to make 
that request, for metaphysics is stranger, more 
marvellous than the land of Nod. That is why one 
likes M. Bergson for having made statements that 
seem paradoxical, or even incredible, and for having 
written his Creative Evolution, the most wonderful 
poem the French have latterly produced. Systems 
of philosophy are heroic fictions which appeal to our 
imagination, but unhappily they are nearly always 
limited to a few centuries, often to their own, and 
we must, therefore, often take them with a grain 
of salt. M. Bergson knows this as well as any one, 
for his method aims at resembling that of nature 
which builds organic structures, not after the manner 
of a manufacturer, but after that of an artist. We 
are too intellectual, he tells us, and that is clever 
of him, for thereby he cuts the ground from under 
his critics' feet. 

In spite of all that pedants think and say, 
philosophy is the art of seeing things as they are, 
and M. Bergson is a past master in that art. Much 
will be forgiven him for his book on laughter.* 

*Laughter. Authorized translation by Cloudlesley Brereton and 
Fred Rothwell. Macmillan, 1911. 

51 



52 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

The man who perceives so nicely that ** rigidity, 
automatism, absentmindedness and nnsociahility are 
all inextricably entwined,*' and all serve as in- 
gredients to the making up of the comic in 
character, gives ns in those words a very solid 
pledge of soundness. The philosopher who knows 
the social functions of laughter is a very sane man. 
**A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible," 
says Emerson. Let all critics of M. Bergson's 
doctrine please note the fact: a philosopher alive 
to the ludicrous is a dangerous adversary. 

Newton achieved immortal fame, according to 
Voltaire, because he one day saw an apple fall off 
a tree. Let us then suppose that M. Bergson's 
renown comes from his having one day seen a 
billiard ball roll along the green cloth of a billiard 
table. We have all seen billiard balls roll along, 
without metaphysics being any the better or worse 
for that. But M. Bergson happened to be think- 
ing of Zeno of Elea whose riddles on motion have 
kept the philosophers busy for close on twenty-four 
centuries. Now Zeno of Elea would say: ^^At every 
moment the ball you think moving is motionless, 
for it cannot have time to move, that is to occupy 
at least two successive positions, unless at least 
two moments are allowed it. At a given moment, 
therefore, it is at rest at a given point, since it is 
there; nor does it move from the point where it 
is not yet, since it is not there. Motionless in each 
point of its course, it is motionless during all the 
_ time that it is moving. Its so-called motion is a 
succession of immobilities.'* M. Bergson reflected 
that the movement of the ball, which at first glance, 
as Zeno had said, seemed decomposable ad libitum, 
was nothing of the sort : that, although the moving 
ball occupied, one after the other, a series of 



HENRI BERGSON 53 

imaginary points on the line, motion itself had noth- 
ing to do with a line. To say that the rolling of a 
ball is a series of points traversed by the ball is to 
attribute to it a series of immobilities. And how 
can movement be reconstituted out of these immo- 
bilities? 

Whenever I imagine a trajectory, my mind always 
wants to deal with an equation ; i. e., my mind 
wishes to picture to itself the positions occupied by 
a certain body moving in space ; and in the case of 
the billiard ball my imagination iramediately calls 
up the picture of the horizontal straight line which 
I have been taught is the shortest distance between 
two points. 

But in reality the ball, though it has created 
distinct movements by the mere fact of occupying 
different positions, has made one indivisible move- 
ment, which ceases to be a movement from the 
moment I stop it in my mind, or stop the ball with 
my hand, or when the ball stops of itself. Of course 
there is a series of intermediate stages in the path 
traversed by the ball; but as places of rest they are 
purely imaginary, since the ball passes on, and its 
passage is movement. 

Let the reader consult M. Bergson's book Time 
and Free Will and his short Treatise ''La Percep- 
tion du Changementy" he will see that the Eleatic 
paradox is M. Bergson's great battle horse. And 
quite right, too. For it is thanks to Zeno that M. 
Bergson has made his great discovery, that ^^ dura- 
tion has no moments which are identical or external 
to one another, being essentially heterogeneous, 
continuous, and with no analogy to number.''* 
Thus Bergson was led to make a great distinc- 

*Ti7ne a/nd Free Will, p. 120. Authorized translation by F. L, 
Pogson, M.A, 



54 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

tion between time and space. Space, as represented 
by the balPs rolling, is nothing but mathematical 
time. Science, when dealing with movement, sub- 
stitutes for concrete movement the trajectory of 
the moving object, and conceives it as a series 
of positions. Science is right when foretelling an 
astronomical phenomenon, but often wrong when 
foretelling a psychological one. Why? Because *Hhe 
future of the material universe, although contem- 
poraneous with the future of a conscious being, has 
no analogy to it, ' ' or if you like, because our states 
of consciousness are processes and not things, 
because they are alive and constantly changing. 
If the orbit of a planet can be perceived all at once, 
it is because its successive positions are the only 
things that matter. 

* ^ In order to put our finger on this vital difference, 
let us assume for a moment that some mischievous 
genius, more powerful still than the mischievous 
genius conjured up by Descartes, decreed that all 
the movements of the universe should go twice as 
fast. There would be no change in astronomical 
phenomena, or at any rate in the equations which 
enable us to foresee them, for in these equations 
the symbol t does not stand for a duration, but for a 
relation between two durations, for a certain number 
of units of time, in short, for a certain number of 
simultaneities: these simultaneities, these coinci- 
dences, would still take place in equal number ; only 
the intervals which separate them would have 
diminished, but these intervals never make their 
appearance in our calculations. Now these inter- 
vals are just duration lived, duration which our 
consciousness perceives, and our consciousness 
would soon inform us of a shortening of the day if 
we had not experienced the usual amount of dura- 



HENRI BERGSON 55 

tion between sunrise and sunset. No doubt it would 
not measure this shortening, and perhaps it would 
not even perceive it immediately as a change of 
quantity; but it would realize in some way or other 
a decline in the usual storing up of experience, a 
change in the progress usually accomplished 
between sunrise and sunsef * 

After all, the ** mischievous genius'' would really 
have the Mad Hatter's conception of time — when 
he says to Alice, ^^Now if only you kept on good 
terms with Time he'd do almost anything you liked 
with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine 
o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons, 
you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and 
round goes the clock in a twinkling ! Half past one, 
time for dinner." — ^This is mathematical time — 
**That would be grand, certainly," said Alice 
thoughtfully, **but, then — I shouldn't be hungry 
for it, you know." This is real time. 

True time, of which we have an intuition, when 
we watch the ball rolling, is not a mathematical 
proportion; it is constituted by deep-seated con- 
scious states, and when our ego allows itself to live, 
and does not separate its present state from its 
former states, those states intermingle in such a 
way that one cannot tell whether they are one or 
several. Our joys, our griefs, for instance, are 
processes and not fixed enduring objects. And the 
moment we try to examine them, we alter their 
nature ipso facto. Hence the extreme difficulty of 
the analytic observation of such mental phenomena. 

One wonders whether M. Bergson ever read 
Coleridge. In any case those who know and appre- 
ciate Coleridge's notebooks have already taken the 
first steps towards a knowledge of Bergson. I know 

*Time amd Free Will, pp. 193, 194. 



56 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

of no clearer commentary upon Bergson's theory 
of duration than this passage from the poet-philo- 
sopher of Highbury, and if I quote it, it is not for 
the very cheap pleasure of seeking one of the hidden 
springs of Bergsonism, but solely in order to make 
Bergson better understood on a very essential point 
of his doctrine. Here is the passage: 

**How opposite to nature and the fact, to talk 
of the *one moment' of Hume, of our whole being 
an aggregate of successive sensations ! Who ever 
felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the 
same moment conscious that there co-exist a 
thousand others, a darker shade, or less light, 
even as when I fix my attention on a white house 
or a grey bare hill, or rather a long ridge that 
runs out of sight each way (how often I want 
the German Unubersekharl) (untranslatable) — 
the pretended sight sensation, is it anything more 
than the light point in every picture either of 
nature or of a good painter! and again, subord- 
inately, in every component part of the picture? 
And what is a moment? succession with inter- 
space? Absurdity! It is evidently only the licht- 
punkt in the indivisible undivided duration.''* 

In this way, as it seems to me, Bergson naturally 
came to believe that the life of our mind was a 
movement like that of the billiard ball. Our states 
of consciousness become fused in one another and 
form the indivisible whole which makes up our 
personality. *^ Within our ego there is succession 
without mutual externality ; outside the ego, in pure 
space, there is mutual externality without succes- 
sion, "t The passage occurs in Time and Free Will, 

*Anima poetae, pp. 102-103, from the unpublished notebooks of 
S. T. Coleridge. London, Heinnemann, 1916. Edited by Ernest 
Hartley Coleridge. 

•fTime and Free Willy p. 108. 



HENRI BERGSON 57 

perhaps the most important of all M. Bergson's 
books, since he explains and establishes in it the 
difference he marks between scientific and psycho- 
logical time. Bergson takes his place beside 
Berkeley, who had pointed out the difference between 
space as understood by the mathematician and space 
as understood by the psychologist. 

When we speak separately of our desires, our 
wishes, our thoughts, we fall into the same error 
as when we imagine the states of immobility in the 
billiard ball's path. Sentiments, ideas, longings, 
these are all the artificial inaccurate labels — albeit 
convenient, if not indispensable — which we place 
upon an ever moving, ever acting, ever flowing 
reality. And yet we keep our personality intact, 
its unity is real. We realize it when, for instance, 
the smell of new-mown hay or of burning wood, 
or a glimpse of a river through the willows, sets us 
thinking of charming moments of our childhood. 
Thus also the picture of a great master reveals his 
whole soul. Our gestures reveal ours. Our states 
of consciousness are each of them the entire mind. 

We might say that our mind is a billiard ball, 
only with this difference, that it is ever changing, 
ripening, creating, growing larger, as it is pushed 
along. It is a flux, a continuum, a long musical com- 
position ever swelling and broadening, in which the 
opening phrase recurs, coloring the whole. Hence 
our personality. If it be objected that we cannot 
think the reality of the life process, I answer that 
we can live it. Indeed we do live it, witness the 
whole history of mankind. Life is a perpetual cre- 
ation, a perpetual birth. It is for each one of us to 
evoke his closest personal recollections, and then 
see if the French philosopher has not sounded the 
depths of our being. 



58 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITEES 

Life sliould be a never-ending journey through 
towns and books and men and things, because every 
new impression penetrates into all the others and 
gives new life to the mind. That is why love, which 
changes for the lover all that he perceives, is master 
of the universe. It is the eternal elixir of youth. 
Again, that is why a powerful imagination which 
deforms or reforms everything is such a miraculous 
thing, consecrating for all time the work of the poet. 
**We might ask ourselves whether Nature is beau- 
tiful otherwise than through meeting by chance cer- 
tain processes of one art, and whether art is not 
prior to Nature'' (page 14, Time and Free Will), 
That is the secret of the fascination of Bergson's 
doctrine ; it appeals to those souls who seek in their 
solitude for renewal, and who ask of philosophy not 
only the meaning of their existence upon earth, but 
a kind of satisfaction for their appetite for the 
subliminal. 

Bergson shows us that it is a great misfortune 
that *4n the humanity of which we are part, 
intuition is almost completely sacrificed to 
intellect.'' But what is intuition? For M. Bergson, 
^*it is a lamp almost extinguished, which only 
glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. On 
our personality, on our liberty, on the place we 
occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin and 
and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light 
feeble and vacillating, but which none the less 
pierces the darkness of the night in which the 
intellect leaves us." 

There is no idea upon which Bergson has dwelt 
so much, nor about which he has been so misunder- 
stood, some critics going as far as to see in him 
an anti-intellectualist. He was the first to wish to 
give a scientific foundation to the old, familiar 



HENRI BERGSON 59 

word, intuition. All the spiritualistic philosophers 
before him had appealed to intuition to establish 
those theses which we regard as essential to our 
moral well being: freewill, immortality of the soul, 
belief in God. They all declared that intuition was 
a part of intellect. But Bergson will admit only 
that intellect is the knowledge of the relationships 
of a given form, *4t is a natural power of relating 
an object to an object, or a part to a part, or an 
aspect to an aspect — in short of drawing conclu- 
sions when in possession of the premises, of proceed- 
ing from what has been learned to what is still un- 
known. It does not say ^^this is,'' it only says that 
**if the conditions are such, such will be the con- 
ditioned. ' ' 

Bergson said that if intuition is intellect, since 
intellect only possesses an external empty knowl- 
edge, the spiritualistic theses constructed upon 
intellect fall down like a pack of cards. But if 
intuition is not of the same order as intellect, if 
it is a knowledge of the world from within, these 
fleeting revelations on our liberty, on our origin, 
on our destiny have a real foundation in life itself. 
**The great error of the doctrines on the spirit 
has been the idea that by isolating the spiritual 
life from all the rest, by suspending it in space as 
high as possible above the earth, they were placing 
it beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply 
exposing it to be taken as an effect of mirage.''* 

Bergson 's declaration that intuition, like in- 
stinct, belonged to life, was a stroke of genius. Man 
is made up both of intellect and intuition. But it is 
by instinct — i. e., intuition — that he comes 'close 
to reality. **The most essential of the primary 
instincts are really vital processes." Instinctive 

^Creative Evolution, p. 283. Op. cit., p. 175. 



60 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

processes are, as it were, the contimiation of those 
organic processes which we constantly see in action 
around us and through which we participate in the 
Great Becoming. And Bergson thinks of the baby 
chick which breaks its shell with a peck of its beak, 
— acting by instinct, carrying on the movement 
which has borne it through embryonic life. Then 
he remembers the famous entomological observa- 
tions of Fabre and others, and thus deep study has 
convinced him that instinct is not resolvable into 
intelligent elements, that Aristotle's idea regarding 
the series of living beings as unilinear was false, 
and he boldly declares that instinct and intuition are 
a prolongation of life, are life itself, and that it 
follows that our ideas of God and destiny are sub- 
stantial and true. 

I may be mistaken, but that is how I see the 
natural development of Bergson 's thought. He first 
discovered what was real time, he saw that our 
deep-seated conscious states were like a musical 
composition being continually amplified; this led 
him to see that our spiritual life was a perpetual 
creation, and that the great obstacle to this per- 
petual birth was that part of the mind we call 
intellect, but that, on the other hand, we had 
intuition, a kind of superior instinct, which, far 
from detaching us from the empirical world, showed 
us its reality and truth. In other terms, Bergson 's 
idea of time begot his conception of intellect and 
intuition, his conception of science, his conception 
of metaphysics, and finally his conception of the 
universe considered as the manifestation of a 
spiritual principle. 

At any rate it looks as if Bergson had set off 
from this conception of spiritual life and arrived 
at this conception of the visible world. The world 



HBNBI BERGSON 61 

is like our spiritual life — a flux, it is forever chang- 
ing. Immobility is only tlie greatest illusion among 
the countless illusions around us. 

Here, as is his habit, Bergson takes his stand upon 
science. *^ Faraday was right who said that all the 
atoms interpenetrate and that each of them filled 
the world. * Things and states are only views taken 
by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, 
there are only actions.* 

Such is the philosophy of children who are not 
too convinced of the reality of their surroundings. 
Stevenson knew that, too: 

"Let the sofa be mountains, the carpets be sea, 
There I'll establish a garden for me." 

Children do not separate the real from the imagined. 
They live in a world of their own, which is as 
real to them as the scholar ^s or philosopher's is 
to him. The ** grown-up" who accuses the child 
of lying falls into gross error, for the child is 
ignorant of falsehood as he is ignorant of truth ; he 
has an inner sense of the world which confuses 
images with the things themselves. How, then, does 
the philosopher act towards the universe, towards 
a table, for example? If I am to believe the Hon. 
Bertrand Russell, a table is for Leibnitz a com- 
munity of souls; for Berkeley, an idea in the mind 
of God ; and if I accept what Professor H. C. Jones 
tells me, a table is nothing other than a collection 
of electrical charges in violent motion. If that is 
really so, there was nothing so strange in Alice's 
seeing the Cheshire cat's grin vanish and appear 
again alone; the oat's grin is merely a vibration 
which lasts rather longer than the other vibra- 
tions. 

^Creative Evolution, pp. 214 and 261. 



62 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

n 

The theory of exterior perception is the corner 
stone of Bergson's philosophy; it is that theory 
which upholds his theory of knowledge and all that 
theory of the natural sympathy which makes us 
penetrate most deeply into the reality with which 
we are surrounded. In studying Bergson we must 
always bear in mind that the simple facts of con- 
sciousness, to whose pure quality he was the first 
to draw our attention, are similar to the facts of 
instinct, as instanced, for example, in certain kinds 
of wasps who attack and paralyze their victim with 
a knowledge and skill possessed by few human 
surgeons. 

Bergson in his acute study of Berkeley* has given 
us the example of what the study of a philosopher 
by philosophic intuition should be. After having 
indicated the various influences undergone by Berke- 
ley, he penetrates into his doctrine like the wasp 
which looks at its victim from within, and he shows 
us Intuition guiding the Bishop of Cloyne in his 
researches and meditations. He rails in pleasant 
vein at those who, in order to reconstruct exter- 
nally Berkeley's doctrine, seek its origin among the 
neo-Platonists, Hobbes, Descartes or Malebranche, 
and we might follow his example and, borrowing 
his own image, gently tease those who speak of the 
Bergsonian salad and declare that the oil of his 
wonderful style, the vinegar of his impatience with 
the materialism of his times, are useful only for 
adding flavor to a mixture of the herbs of neo- 
Platonist and German philosophy, dusted over with 
a salt of Eavaisson and William James. 

*UIntuition philosophique, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 
1911. 



HENEI BERGSON 63 

If we in our turn are to discover the image or 
concept directing Bergson in his researches, we 
must first put on one side all the images with which 
he embellishes his works — such as the shell burst- 
ing into fragments which are again shells, or the 
reservoir filled with boiling water from which steam 
is issuing. These are the tricks of the poet, mere 
illustrations of his thought, but they are not its 
starting point. Bergson has understood Berkeley's 
thought so well because he has lived it; and the 
study to which we refer, and in which he has put 
the best of himself, is vivified by that Inj;uition which 
must serve us as guide. Not only do we see only 
what we have eyes to see, as Bergson teaches us, 
but we see well only when we ^*put back our being 
into our will.*' *^Is it ilot patent,'' he asks, 'Hhat 
the philosopher's first step, while his thought is still 
uncertain, is to reject definitely certain things? 
Later he may vary in what he affirms, he will not 
vary in what he denies." 

So that with Mr. Bergson the first impulse was 
a movement of reaction against contemporary natu- 
ralism, because of his inability to accept a blind 
mechanism as efficient cause of our knowledge of 
reality. 

The profound intuition he had of our psychic 
states was this : they do not constitute a numerical 
multiplicity. We attribute that to them as we pro- 
ject them symbolically into space. But in themselves 
they are pure quality and, as such, incommensurable. 
There is no fixed quantity of spiritual energy in 
the world. We break up our inner life into a mul- 
tiplicity of fragmentary states which we imagine to 
be fixed and which are not; and we act in the same 
way when we perceive the external world. We cut 
reality up into slices when we situate it in space. 



64 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

Or, to express the same idea differently, we migM 
say that the explanation of the problem of knowl- 
edge is not to be found in the idealistic theory 
wherein the spirit does not emerge from itself, nor 
in the materialistic theory which declares that all 
objects are independent things able to exist without 
the mind. 

How does Bergson perceive matter? In the same 
way, I think, as Berkeley perceives it (I purposely 
use Bergson 's own words), **as a thin transparent 
film situated between man and God.'' Whatever 
differences there may be between Berkeley and 
Bergson — differences upon which Bergson has 
dwelt in Matter and Memory, and although Bergson 
has not yet composed his theodicy — these two phi- 
losophers have the same conception of the world. 
The one will call bodies ideas, the other will call 
them images. And both will mean by that, firstly, 
that things really are what we perceive them to be, 
that our senses do not deceive us and that there is 
not behind the sensible qualities of things a mat- 
ter impossible to conceive; and, secondly, that the 
vital Force (the one will call it God, the other the 
Impetus of Life) has created Intellect to know the 
world of matter, and has given to matter the ap- 
pearance of an existence spread out in space. Berke- 
ley in this way arrives at saying that Nature is the 
language in which God speaks to man. Bergson is 
not so very far from Berkeley in spite of appear- 
ances. When he declares with great insistence that 
'^^ intellect and matter have progressively adapted 
themselves one to the other in order to attain at 
last a common form,'' he places God near at hand, 
in the time which we feel to be the very stuff of our 
Ife. 

The worlds and beings we see around us have 



HENRI BERGSON 65 

their origin and life in tlie single force wMcli Berg- 
son calls supraconsciousness, above matter and be- 
yond it. For him the idea of creation is merged 
in that of growth, ^*God having nothing of the 
already made.'' As for inert matter, its immo- 
bility is an appearance, purely and simply. Since 
everything is movement, since movement is reality 
itself, **what we call immobility is a certain state 
of things identical or analogous with what happens 
when two trains run with the same speed, in the 
same direction, upon parallel lines ; each train seems 
motionless to the travellers seated in the other — 
immobility being that which our intellect desires, 
we make a reality of it, an absolute, and we see 
in movement something adding itself thereto.*' 
And a little further on he adds : ^* All the mechanism 
of our perception of things, like that of our action 
upon things, has been regulated in order to here 
arrange, between the external and internal mobility, 
a situation analogous to our two trains, doubtless 
more complicated, but of the same kind.''* 

Matter then resolves into vibrations: for that is 
all Bergson leaves to matter, and it was rendered 
equally bare by the philosophy of Berkeley. Berg- 
son then is not a realist, because, in his view, the 
realists break up, for the greater convenience of 
practical life, the continuity of the real. They set 
up as absolute that division of matter ^* which, in our 
view, is hardly anything but an outward projection 
of human needs." **Pure intuition, external or 
internal, is that of an undivided continuity;" . . . 
*'the divisibility of matter is entirely relative to our 
action thereon. ' 'f 

This brings us back to Berkeley's point of view, 

^Perception du changement, p. 20, u. & seq. 
iMatter and Memory, pp. 215, 239, 292. 



66 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

as expressed by Bergson: **La matiere est inex- 
tensive a notre representation, elle n'a pas d'inte- 
rieur, pas de dessous, elle ne cache rien, ne renferme 
rien, elle ne possede ni puissances, ni virtualites 
d^aucune espece, elle est etalee en surface, etc.''* 

Bergson will say there are no things, there are 
only actions. This once grasped, it is easy to un- 
derstand Bergson 's theory of perception. We are 
in whatever we perceive. I am part of the scent 
of the lilac as it comes into my window. I exist 
in the organ vibrations which pierce the cathedral 
walls. My being is prolonged in things, and I pos- 
sess the universe in my sensations. Venus rising 
from the ocean waves, such is the image of the 
awakening of ourself in the bosom of all things. I 
know of no better paraphrase of Bergsonian percep- 
tion than ClaudePs famous passage in his poem 
''L' Esprit et VEau" {Cinq Grandes Odes) : 

*'0h que je tourne la tete 
J'envisage rimmense octave de la Creation! 
Le monde s'ouvre et si large qu'en soit rempan, mon regard le 

traverse d'un bout a I'autre. 
J'ai pese le soleil ainsi qu'un gros mouton que deux homines forts 

suspendent a une perche entre leurs epaules. 
J'ai recense Tarmee des Cieux et j'en ai dresse etat, 
Depuis les grandes Figures qui se penchent sur le vieillard Oc^an 
Jusqu'au feu le plus rare englouti dans le plus profond abime, 
Ainsi que le Pacifique bleu-sombre ou le baleinier epie I'event d'un 

souffleur comme un duvet blanc. 
Vous etes pris et d'un bout du monde jusqu'^ I'autre autour de 

vous 
J'ai tendu I'immense rets de ma connaissancet 
Comme la phrase qui prend aux cuivres 
Gagne les bois et progressivement envahit les profondeurs de 

I'orchestre 
Et comme les eruptions du soleil 



* Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale. 1911. Ulntuition Philo- 
where except in man consciousness has let itself be caught in the 
net whose meshes it tried to pass through." Also p. 213 : "Mind uses 
space like a net . . . which thrown over matter divides it. . . ." 
sophique. 

tA Bergsonian image. Cf. Creative Evolution, p. 278: "Every- 



HENRI BERGSON 67 

Se repercutent sur la terre en crise d'eau et en raz de niur^e, 
Ainsi du plus grand Ange qui vous voit jusqu'au caillou de la 

route et d'un bout de votre creation jusqu'a I'autre, 
II ne cesse point continuite non plus que de Tame au corps." 

But not only is there union between object and 
subject in perception, there is unity, declares 
M. Bergson. His metaphysics demand that. The 
spiritual forces working in the universe are within 
us. The beneficent reality in which we bathe is 
itself consciousness, and our perception, aided natu- 
rally by our memory, makes us penetrate into that 
creative force which has succeeded, by traversing 
matter, in arriving at something which is realized 
only in man. 

In this way may be explained the phenomena of 
telepathy, suggestion, second sight, which show the 
spirit breaking through the bonds of the body. So 
also may be explained the fact that man guesses 
the secrets of nature; his presentiments, his intui- 
tions, are flashes of illumination sent by the Great 
Reality. So again may be explained the interpene- 
tration of different consciousnesses, and the fact that 
old married couples grow alike in face and mind, or 
that the words of certain great mystics have been 
anticipations of future truths.* 

On the other hand, our nature, as Pascal finely 
guessed, is only a first habit ; our feelings, our con- 
cepts, our gestures, have become in time a force 
which acts within us, which creates an incessant 
novelty and in this way is stronger than mat- 
ter in creating in its turn; ^^the living being 
is above all a thoroughfare.'' Life is always 
free, spontaneous, incalculable. Carlyle's Essay on 

*"An identical process miust have cut out matter and the intel- 
lect, at the same time, from a stuff that contained both. Into this 
reality we shall get back more and more completely, in proportion 
as we compel ourselves to transcend pure intelligence." Creative Evo- 
lution, p. 210. 



68 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

Cromwell is an excellent explanation of this doctrine. 

Consciousness, then, is the great, the only reality. 
Since Descartes we have been taught that mind and 
matter were two realities of different nature and 
irreducible to unity. But Bergson separates him- 
self from such doctrine, which leads either to a 
naive realism according to which mind is only an 
epiphenomenon or to a subtle idealism which de- 
clares that all reality is only mental. Eeality is 
movement, indivisible Duration, Universal Becom- 
ing, It is the common origin whence come matter 
and intellect, and intellect was evolved only to deal 
with matter. 

Perception is, therefore, action ^s tool used by our 
body to cut into the future: it is the point of the 
knife dividing the universal flow. The resulting 
slice is what we call matter, that is to say, a selec- 
tion and contraction of images in duration. "What 
constitutes the image in each case is the selection 
and contraction effected by memory. This spir- 
itual activity which prolongs the past into the pres- 
ent plays then a most important part : it renders per- 
ception possible. 

Without wishing to try to summarize the well- 
packed pages of Matter and Memory, nor to enter 
into the discussion of details, we may here remind 
the reader that for M. Bergson perception is the 
great act of Life. We are only to resign ourselves 
to conception, when perception is lacking.* Hap- 
pily Art is there to show us that an extension of our 
faculties is possible. The poet, painter and mu- 
sician have perceived in nature a host of aspects 
which we have doubtless seen but which we have 
not really noticed. Bergson 's book on Laughter is 

* Perception du Changement, p. 5 et seq. 



HENEI BERGSON 69 

entirely based on this intuition that Art is a more 
direct vision of reality, because the artist places 
himself back within the object by his sympathy. 
Never was M. Bergson better inspired than in his 
passage on music, because music is the expression 
of thoughts so profound that words are powerless 
to express them. Here again, like Berkeley, Berg- 
son shows the greatest distrust of language. Ab- 
straction has created a veil of symbols which hides 
Reality from us. Music is one of the dynamic 
schemes, motive rather than representative, a natu- 
ral outpouring inexpressible in itself, the very mani- 
festation of the activity which pushes the world 
forward, vibrations laden with pure emotion which 
enable us to recover contact with Life. And M. 
Bergson has constant recourse to music to make 
us understand his theory. **Let us listen to a 
melody, letting ourselves be lulled by it: have we 
not the clear perception of a movement which is 
attached to no mobile, of a change without anything 
changing? The change is self-sufficing, it is the 
thing itself.''* 

Samuel Butler, in his The Way of All Flesh, has 
an amusing passage which always reminds me of 
certain passages in Matter and Memory. I mean 
the advice given by the Doctor when consulted for 
the cure of Ernest Pontifex. *'I have found the 
Zoological Gardens of service to many of my 
patients. I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex a 
course of the larger mammals. Don't let him think 
he is taking them medicinally, but let him go to 
their house twice a week for a fortnight, and stay 
with the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros and the 
elephants till they begin to bore him. I find these 

^ ^Perception du Changement, p. 24. 



70 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITEES 

beasts do my patients more good than any others. 
The monkeys are not a wide enough cross; they 
do not stimulate sufficiently. The larger camivora 
are unsympathetic. The reptiles are worse than 
useless, and the marsupials are not much better. 
Birds again, except parrots, are not very beneficial ; 
but he may look at them now and again, but with 
the elephants and the pig tribe generally he should 
mix as freely as possible.'* 

Readers of Butler will remember how beneficial 
the treatment proved, and how the hero drank in 
great draughts of these animals' lives to the regen- 
eration of his own. We may seem to be some way 
from Matter and Memory, but in reality we are not 
far. For Bergson, as for Butler, the line separating 
things from their surroundings is in no wise clearly 
defined. Just as mthin ourselves no sensation can 
be detached, or isolated from the states of conscious- 
ness with which it is linked, so in the universe there 
is no such thing as an isolated object: between the 
world of mind and the world of matter, there is 
contest, of course, but first of all there are action 
and interaction. Consciousness and matter arrive 
at an understanding, for matter contains a kind of 
elasticity which its adversary, life, turns to its 
profit. Matter is indivisible like consciousness, and 
sensation is extensive like matter. 

If this be the case (and Bergson founds his 
Creative Evolution upon this contest between 
consciousness and matter), it is quite comprehens- 
ible that the Zoological Gardens should be an ex- 
cellent school of psycho theraphy. We have only 
to look back upon our childhood to understand this 
saying of Bergson 's, which Butler might have 
signed: ^^ Spirit borrows from matter the percep- 
tions in which it feeds and restores them to matter 



HENRI BERGSON 71 

in the form of movements wMcli it lias stamped 
with its freedom.'' The child does not separate 
himself from his surrounding objects. His repre- 
sentation is, to begin with, impersonal. It is only- 
later that he externalizes his concepts in relation to 
one another. But we become as children again in 
our day-dreams, in those states of the soul in which 
the external world is not distinct from us, but in 
which life appears a series of wonderful possibil- 
ities. 

On the whole, with Bergson we are in the world 
of Change. We are constantly changing, and each 
of our changing states is in itself a change. There 
is a continuity in our discontinuity, and discontin- 
uity in our continuity. Bergson has been called 
the modern Heraclitus, but we must be very sure 
what is meant by that. Certainly he would say that, 
supposing our earth were destroyed by fire, the 
conflagration of the universe would be nothing but 
a transition to a new universe. But he is a Hera- 
clitus who has read his philosophic predecessors and 
has reflected and consequently thinks of safeguard- 
ing truth from this flux. He saw clearly that, when 
he declared nothing was fixed, he was giving himself 
up, bound hand and foot, to the mercies of the 
skeptic. Therefore, as soon as he has overthrown 
the temple of truth built by human intellect, he 
orders at once a more mysterious one to be made by 
intuition. 

Intellect can give us only very relative, if very 
practical, ideas of an object. Intuition enables us 
to enter into that object. Since reality is all change 
and flux, we enter into it for a moment of this flux ; 
so that in the end we are only taking part in the 
Eternal Becoming, mere artisans, conscious or un- 
conscious, of the divine which creates itself in every 



72 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

age. **In the Shakespearean drama, '^ Coleridge 
writes, fresh from the schools of Germany, ** there is 
a vitality which grows and evolves itself from 
within/* Substitute universe for Shakespearean 
drama, and you have Bergson's doctrine in a nut- 
shell. 

It is clearly more than easy to ridicule this con- 
ception, and the famous passage in the third book 
of Pantagruel comes uninvited to mind, when 
Panurge, under pretense of praising debtors and 
borrowers, laughs at all the ** doctrinaires, *' all 
makers of systems, all those who think that they 
have discovered in a Word the master key to all 
the locks of nature, the Open Sesame to all its doors. 
And where Panurge uses the word debt, I can 
imagine an Anatole France using the word duration, 
''Debt is the great soul of the universe. ... A 
cosmos without debts ! . . . Then among the planets 
would be no regular course ; all would be in disorder. 
Jupiter reckoning himself to be nothing indebted 
unto Saturn would go near to detrude him out of his 

sphere The moon will remain bloody and 

obscure,*' etc., etc. 

But it must be admitted that for all those who do 
not accept the doctrine of a revealed religion, the 
Bergsonian system offers an excellent solution of 
most of the difficulties of contemporary philosophy. 

When Kant asks himself whether the categories 
of the human mind do not mutilate reality on a Pro- 
crustean bed, Darwin and his disciples, far from re- 
futing, support his argument by showing that human 
reason and animal instinct are only adaptations of 
human organism for the furtherance of life in given 
surroundings. Then, at that point, Bergson inter- 
venes and shows us that intuition, though it is 
like instinct in one sense, differs from it in that it is 



HENRI BERGSON 73 

not a biological but a spiritual instrument, enabling 
us to see the world in a simple flux. 

The great writer of whom one is reminded here 
and whose influence was, and is, greater even than 
that of Bergson in Anglo-Saxon countries is Wil- 
liam James. If we wish to measure the sum of our 
indebtedness to these men we have only to examine, 
in perusing our daily papers, to what extent our 
ways of thinking are moulded, consciously or uncon- 
SKiiously, by their universal touch. It will be one 
of the tasks of the historian of the future to appor- 
tion to each of these writers not only his particular 
share of influence upon us, but also the exact im- 
print they had on each other. Briefly, and in order 
to avoid paying to the one tribute which might 
appear to be criticism of the other, let it be said 
of both that their common sense, their catholic sym- 
pathies, their love of energy and life and human 
endeavor, their sense of individual as well as rela- 
tive values, their wide and scientific outlook upon 
life, have led them to see that Darwinism was at 
bottom a doctrine of life and freedom, spontaneity 
and spirituality. 

Of the two William James is the clearer, being 
more human and taking Philosophy by the hand as 
a child in leading strings. James loves to talk with 
the man in the street, to harass him with words of 
wisdom and vituperate against the flesh and the 
devil. He is dominated by a Puritan ardor, intrep- 
ity and the love of virtue, together with a touch of 
the spirit of the Norman adventurer. Bergson is 
more academic, more aloof, more amoral, yet under- 
lying the coldness of the philosopher we can see 
blazing up countless mingled Gallic and Hebraic 
creations and inventions, and can feel their 
warmth. William James's philosophy is like a boy's 



74 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

running away to sea with all its wonderful possi- 
bilities. Bergson's audacity of thought, great as it 
is, does not prevent his sometimes seeing the Abso- 
lute in the shape of a Professor of the ^* College de 
France/' 

Still, when all is said and done, their philosophy, 
by placing Spirit above intellect and declaring that 
above reason there is a more direct source of con- 
sciousness, intuition, and leading as it does directly 
to ethics, is singularly alike. It consists, above and 
before all, in admitting that there are limits to our 
faculty of comprehension: limits laid down by our- 
selves and by Nature ; and it insists upon our mak- 
ing a serious effort to enrich our ethical conscious- 
ness. James asks us first and foremost to act and 
work; Bergson declares that creative energy is 
insight. James demands that we should be dead to 
reason in order to become perfect Christians. Berg- 
son demands that we should be dead to the ** categ- 
ories'^ of our intellect in order to become perfect 
philosophers. James declares that we are created 
to act rather than to chop logic, and Bergson in his 
turn affirms that we are made much more for action 
than for thought. But both agree, ^^We must take 
things by storm; we must thrust intelligence out- 
side itself by an act of will.'' 

Both thinkers react against a certain science of 
their age and at the same time against a certain 
literature made up of rebellion against laws and 
order. It is of the greatest interest to watch how 
these two thinkers, after having exalted energy 
and boldness, affirm that ethics and not tempera- 
ment are the supreme facts to which allegiance 
must be owned, and how in this way they pass from 
the narrow philosophy of subjectivism to the wide 
field of objectivism. 



HENRI BERGSON 75 

This is not the place to follow up a parallel which 
imposes itself upon every reader who knows the two 
writers, but it is interesting to note that James's 
presbyterianism had the same result as Bergson's 
amoralism: it silenced the sentimental whimper- 
ings of temperament and bade them act in manly 
fashion. The doctrines which admit the omnipo- 
tence of a superior and a^^ul Being are also the 
doctrines which lay greatest stress upon the impor- 
tance of energy, of courage, and the heroic virtues, 
as are also those which declare that creation '4s 
not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when 
we act freely/' None acquainted with the play of 
our intellect will be surprised at this attraction of 
contraries. 

What scientific feeling revealed to James, aes- 
thetic feeling revealed to Bergson: the absolute 
error of scientists in claiming to measure the scope 
of our sensations ; the folly, in a word, of the science 
called psychophysics. Every sensation as it grows 
becomes transformed. It is no more possible to con- 
ceive the sum of our difference between two sensa- 
tions than it is to draw a boundary line between 
memory and consciousness. 

Bergson realized that very clearly, and was led 
thereby to see and to teach that the body was util- 
ized by the mind, or rather that ''The spirit over- 
flows the brain on every side, and cerebral activity 
corresponds only to an infinitesimal part of mental 
activity."* His famous thesis Time and Free Will is 
devoted to showing that mathematical laws, though 
they may explain the material universe, are power- 
less to explain the world of our soul. Our Psyche 
is not merely the interpreter who translates by 

*Cf. L'dme et le corps. Conference faite par M. Bergson. Le 
Mat^rialisme actuel. Paris, Flammarion, 1914. 



76 SOME MODERN FEENCH WEITEES 

thought and feeling the things which our body ex- 
presses in extent and in movement. Our Psyche 
is original, is free, is capable of creating: above all, 
she is the mistress of the body which she makes her 
slave. 

But, whether we will or no, moral questions will 
have themselves asked in philosophy. If existence 
is not one great struggle for greater good, it is of 
no more worth than those plays which delighted our 
childhood, wherein virtue was always rewarded 
and vice duly punished. But a philosopher like 
Bergson who has reflected upon Eeality is forced 
in spite of himself, even though his work aims at 
being or seeming entirely a-moral, — into the poign- 
ant realization of a war to the knife between the 
powers of good and evil, between barbarism and 
liberty. Within us all is a spiritual power in which 
we can take refuge and meditate at ease : it is there 
that are to be found the deep roots of our personality 
communicating with all nature. 

That is what Bergson realized so fully, and that 
part of his philosophy will always appeal to a spirit 
with a passion for the ideal. 

It is very interesting to see in what light many 
Frenchmen have considered Bergson and stripped 
him of his Anglo-Saxon garments. Most of Berg- 
son's admirers have affected to see in him only the 
philosopher for whom our reason is a mere collec- 
tion of scraps, a heap of rubbish. 

After all, Bergson 's book on laughter is the best 
commentary on his doctrine. The philosopher who 
is always crying, *^ Automatism is our great enemy,'* 
is the apostle of elasticity df character. When a 
man becomes a man of one idea, a pure mechanism, 
he should be laughed at. Spirituality is a progress 
to ever new creations. Let us praise the poet or 



HENRI BERGSON 77 

writer who, intoxicated with the heady wine of his 
own imagination, writes poems or novels full of 
daring thoughts. That is the explanation of Berg- 
son's influence upon so many of his contemporaries, 
in particular of his influence upon Georges Sorel,* 
and his disciple, Edouard Berth. Indeed, both these 
men appear sometimes to be juggling with Berg- 
son's doctrine. The idea that since motion is an 
indivisible whole, a general strike must be an indi- 
visible whole, only proves that, if one puts one's 
mind to it, a theory of violence and sabotage can be 
deduced from Creative Evolution. Bergson can- 
not be held responsible for such disciples, whose 
banner bears the strange device, **Down with 
intellectualism. ' ' 

Bergson offers us the curious spectacle of a 
philosopher of Jewish origin who has had the singu- 
lar fortune of bringing to Catholicism such men 
as M. Maritain (who later, of course, attacked him), 

*M. Georges Sorel, an idealist and pragmatist and an inconsistent 
socialist, in his book, Reflexions sur la Violence, has not failed to 
notice the resemblance between Cardinal Newman and Bergson. "It 
is impossible to read Newman without being struck by the analogies 
between his thought and that of Bergson: people who like to make 
the history of ideas depend on ethical traditions will observe that 
Newman was descended from Israelites." 

The passage quoted by Sorel is the following: "Assent, however 
strong, and accorded to images however vivid, is not therefore neces- 
sarily practical. Strictly speaking, it is not imagination that causes 
action, but hope and fear, likes and dislikes, appetite, passion, affec- 
tion, the stirrings of selfishness and self-love. What imaginiitioii 
does for us is to find a means of stimulating those motive powers; 
and it does so by providing a supply of objects strong enough to 
stimulate them. It will be our wisdom to avail ourselves of lan- 
guage, as far as it will go, but to aim mainly, by means of it, to 
stimulate, in those to whom we address ourselves, a mode of thinking 
a.nd trains of thought similar to our own, leading them on by their 
own independent action, not by any syllogistic compulsion. Hence 
it is that an intellectual school will always have eometliing of an 
esoteric character: for its aim is an assemblage of minds that think, 
their bond is unity of thought and their words become a sort of 
tessera, not expressing thought, but symbolizing it." {Grammar of 
Afsent, p. 302. Burns k Gates, 1870.). 



78 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

M. Joseph Lotte, and, most famous of all, Charles 
Peguy. At the same time he has as antagonists 
the orthodox believers, thomists or cartesians, like 
Mgr. Farges and the Abbe Piat, and the rationalists 
for whom M. Bergson's philosophy is pure verbiage. 
M. Julien Benda has given himself a good deal of 
entertainment in pointing out the chinks in Berg- 
son's armor, and it is, of course, obvious that when 
the philosopher declares that the Real is the inef- 
fable and inexpressible, he condemns us to silence. 

Of all the French disciples, M. E. Le Roy is the 
one who has studied his master with most devotion 
and greatest profit. One wonders whether the dis- 
tinguished mathematician is to become the new 
Malebranche of a new Descartes. It would cer- 
tainly seem that the reading of Bergson was for 
him a mystic experience: ** Truth known by the 
heart. ' ' 

No reasoning can prevail against such immediate 
experience. The man who has arrived without the 
aid of dialectics at understanding that *^ Spirit is 
the immediate cause of all the phenomena in na- 
ture," can afford to laugh at ironical logicians.* 

Bergson is above all a great poet. I give him the 
title to do him honor and not at all in the depreca- 
tory sense in which certain critics use the term. 
After all it is the poets who are the true immortals, 
and they have an advantage over the philosophers 
in that they make every one take an interest in 
spiritual moods and imaginative passions. 

^Berkeley 3rd Dialogues letween Hylas and Philonous. 



MAUEICE BARRES 

A PERSONALITY as complex as M. Barres' is 
well calculated to attract and defy criticism, 
for he unites in the highest degree the 
faculty of contemplation with the talent for action, 
combining the idealist and the practical man, the 
mystic and the realist, being at the same time Presi- 
dent of the League of Patriots and a great parlia- 
mentary figure. Politics, of course, is a serious and 
rough-and-tumble game requiring a quick wit, but 
little deep or imp'artial intelligence. In a world of 
partisans misunderstanding must reign supreme. 
Common sense bids you stick to your party, when 
self-interest counsels a palinode. Besides, in this 
region poetical and lofty ideas are very dangerous 
explosives. Treading the clouds must be left to 
the tight-rope dancer. The best politician is evi- 
dently in this mad world the city contractor, or 
financier, or soap manufacturer. It is not for us 
to be wiser than life: we must accept it as it is. 
M. Barres ^s success is, therefore, all the more 
interesting in that his soaring imagination, his 
avidity for ideas, have never been checked by the 
materialism of a changeable Parisian World. 

A greater artist than Disraeli, whom he recalls 
80 often, he is not so successful a statesman, because 
he is a lesser cynic, and because French political 
life is not, or was not, so nicely arranged as English. 
Yet the fact that his virile style and heroic senti- 
ment made the Echo de Paris during the war one 

79 



80 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

of the most popular newspapers in France, seems 
to show the elevation of mind of a nation whose 
speculative faculty is seldom divorced from the 
practical. Again, Bar res ^s indomitable will reminds 
his reader of Disraeli, as well as his outlook on life, 
and that easy spanning of enormous distances of 
thought which characterizes both the Oriental and 
the French mind. Art for both of them is the great 
force which takes men out of themselves and in so 
doing directs them to the one and only path of 
eternal truth. **To rule men, we must be men," as 
Disraeli said one day ; ^ ^ to prove that we are giants, 
we must be dwarfs, even as the Eastern genie was 
hid in the charmed bottle." Barres holds such doc- 
trine essential. His mind is never dazzled by his 
own fancies. At bottom, like your true Lorrain, he 
is of the earth earthy, but his poetic power is like 
the skylark which, springing from the soil, breaks 
up **the tiresome old roof of heaven" into enchant- 
ing and melodious forms. 

Bergson realized that there is a power other than 
mere intellectualism, whose impetus leads mankind 
through life. Study Barres, his books and his 
polemics, and you will see how this stormy p'etrel 
of politics plays in the fiercest tempest, with a 
feeling that he is part of the force which controls 
the hurricane. 

The interest of a study of Barres lies in the fact 
that, whenever his spirit took a step forward, it 
ranged itself in a wider sphere than the one left 
behind. The aesthete became member of Parliament, 
the editor of the Cocarde in due time succeeded Paul 
Deroulede at the head of the League of Patriots. 
The inexhaustible discontent of a Byron, sl Chateau- 
briand or a Benjamin Constant changed in Barres' 
soul into a nationalism which is for him above all 



MAUEICE BAREES 81 

good breeding, and which forces the agnostic in 
him to appreciate the order and tradition of the 
Church of France. 

We see him at twenty in 1882 coming to Paris 
from his Lorraine, anxious to know and under- 
stand all. Nature had endowed him with a peculiar 
modesty always on stilts, and with a hero-wor- 
shipping faculty beginning perhaps too often at 
home; and in addition she gave him the same gift 
she gave to his fellow countryman, Callot, that of 
seeing things at once in their true and in their 
grotesque lights. These gifts, together with his 
unslumbering curiosity, his unerring instinct for 
unmasking a countenance and his youthful super- 
ciliousness, led him to adopt that ironical pose 
which is so entertaining both for himself and for 
his reader. It is true, the author sometimes pays 
too dearly for his pleasure and ours, too often his 
mind is merely a dull kaleidoscope and demands 
a constant change of amusement of which he is 
the first to recognize the vanity. Continual change 
is no change. He seems to believe that it is posi- 
tively immoral not to be cosmopolitan, and so, at 
every turn of the road, he presses furiously forward 
to find a new God, hoping to enjoy the discovery 
with the ^^ child's first pleasure'' of Wordsworth 
and the daffodils. But, as he pitches his tent not 
by the side of a lake, but under the shadow of the 
nihilism of Eenan or Stendhal and the pessimism 
of Baudelaire, he cannot hear the birds singing 
merrily while Pippa passes. Yet the stars shine 
out at times overhead, and good is in his heart. 
Then the idea dawns upon him that what is truly 
wonderful in him is his very mind able to conjure 
up all the beauties he aspires to possess. 

And so at the end of his literary pilgrimages he 



82 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

is left to whistle by himself, and lie realizes that 
only one thing really exists, and that is self. The 
universe is a great palace of delights, which self 
creates and destroys at the bidding of caprice, and 
wherein the gods with whom you feast are your 
own thoughts. But at the same time the universe 
is the Great Whole, living, thinking, speaking to 
the mind of man. Subjective Pantheism, in the 
hands of an artist such as Barres, is like a futile 
game of cup and ball: mind and matter play with 
each other without intermingling with each other. 
Life has no meaning. You spend it in endless 
wishes, and in knowing that your wishes will never 
be satisfied. You long for eternal emotions, and 
are in reality only a series of successive states of 
mind. 

Your temperament is all-important in your eyes, 
yet what a tiny thing it is in the hard and stem 
mechanism of the universe! However, this dualism 
of fervent feeling and cold intellect, these anti- 
nomies of temperament, represent the hunger for 
beauty which cannot but be appeased, and which 
must be fostered at all costs. 

Barres has himself told us that those idealogioal 
novels, Sous I'oeil des Barhares, VRomme Libre, le 
Jar din de Berenice, VEnnemi des Lois, are the out- 
come of **une prodigieuse susceptibilite cerebrale." 
But this susceptibility must be cultivated by study, 
it must be oared for, it needs a soul-hygiene.* There 
is no reason for spuming the methods of pious men 
of the past, even though their ideas no longer 
appeal, — ^men like Saint Ignatius, for example. 
Indeed, there is every reason why a skeptic, or a 
pagan, should use these spiritual exercises, for by 
so doing he will show the breadth of his mind. 

*See Trois Stations de Psychotherapie. Perrier. Paris, 1891. 



MAURICE BAREES 83 

The positivists acted in the same way when they 
recommended the reading of the Imitation while 
attempting to substitute Humanity for Grod. Hu- 
manity being an abstraction, Barres thought of 
replacing it by self which is Reality, and for his 
newl religion he laid down the following precepts: 
**We are never so happy as when in a state of exalta- 
tion. The pleasure of exaltation is enhanced by 
analysis. We must aim, then, at feeling as much as 
possible while at the same time we analyze as much 
as possible.'' 

Comte dreamed of a cult of Humanity, but Barres 
thinks only of an extension of Self; and in this 
way dilletantism becomes a sort of religion, a new 
form of holy narcissism. 

This religion is practised by Barres in three ways. 
In the first place he mocks his contemporaries. 
Everyone knows his extraordinary pamphlets on 
Renan with their superb self-confidence, their amus- 
ing juvenile ferocity, and their power of hitting the 
mark. Huit Jours chez Renan and Renan au Purga- 
toire will live as long as some of the malicious 
tales of Voltaire. Secondly, he plunges into politics 
and the attractions of Parliament. The spice of 
Parliamentary life is battle, and Barres has had 
his fill of it with his Boulangism and his Nation- 
alism. ^^For Grod's sake,'' said Stevenson, ^^give 
me the young man who has brains enough to make a 
fool of himself ! ' ' But Barres never went so far ; his 
sense of humor was too keen. Finally, he travels, 
and we meet him in Italy or Spain or Greece, in 
those antique-laden lands where the dust on the 
roads is the dust of human bones. Nature can only 
speak to him insomuch as she is Clio's dwelling 
place. The sermons he finds in stones are the history 
of humanity. A landscape tells him no speaking 



84 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

story until tlie day on wMcli man suffered there. 
Thus is intensified Ms passion for sharing in all 
men^s passions. Disraeli's saying, ^* Every moment 
is travel if rightly understood, ' ' was Barres ' motto, 
and he went to Aigues-Mortes, to Venice, and to To- 
ledo in order to saturate his every moment with 
eternity. If Venice enchants him, it is because, to 
his mind, no place lends itself so well to analysis of 
shades of feeling, and because Goethe, Chateau- 
briand, Byron, Georges Sand, de Musset, Theophile 
Gautier and Wagner have lived there in their time. 
Toledo attracts him inasmuch as it was the haunt 
of Greco. *^J'y respire une volupte dont j 'ignore 
le nom, et quelque chose comme un peche se mele a 
tout un passe d 'amour, d'honneur et de religion. 
C'est le mystere de Tolede et nous voudrions le 
saisir." At Ravenna thoughts assail him on every 
side as if they had been left behind there by all the 
men who have passed through the city, with their 
passionate desires and hatreds. 

Barres is like the traveler who knows all the echoes 
of the mountain passes on his way and who amuses 
himself with hearing his own words return to him 
in mysterious and multisonous thunders. His writ- 
ings on criticism, or travel, or philosophy, are really 
an interpretation of German metaphysics, and that 
is why the English writers he most recalls are 
Disraeli, Coleridge and Carlyle. The magnificent 
pages which the great Scot devotes to Dante, for 
instance, are Barres avant la lettre, and perhaps 
the advantage is with Carlyle. Honors divided; 
for both men have the true taste for the divine, 
and both have drawn from the same German 
romantic source. 

When we want to get at the young Barres, we see 



MAURICE BARRES 85 

that after all the most important things about him 
are his childhood in Lorraine and his German 
culture.* All his early books are either the sensual 
application of the doctrines of Kant or Fichte, of 
Hegel's notion of universal becoming, and his idea 
of the identity of contraries, or else the outcome 
of a most ardent patriotism. And for a long time 
this patriotism drew its weapons from Germany. 

*"My early childhood was spent at Strasbourg and in Alsace as 
well as at Charmes and in Lorraine. When I was three years old 
I was sent to a religious establishment where the good sisters could 
not do enough to spoil me. I was often taken to Strasbourg cathe- 
dral, and tJie hours I spent in that mystic atmosphere have left very 
happy impressions upon my mind. 

"But the memory which dominates my childhood is that of the 
events of 1870. I was eight years old when war broke out. First 
of all I saw convoys of French soldiers pass by. For lack of room, 
the men were put on the roofs of the carriages when the inside was 
full and the poor wretches were scorched by the burning August 
Bun. Wine in plenty was brought to them, although most of them 
were already drunk. Some time after, hidden in a hay cart, I saw 
the lamentable rout of du Failly's army corps, defeated at Froesch- 
viller. The regiments were driven back in disorder, and blocked up 
the road to such an extent, that I had to stay in my hay cart all 
day. They were ordered to encamp in a meadow near Charmes. 

"At home we had some oflScers dining with us. I was not allowed 
to appear at table, for the sight of a child might have been yet 
another sorrow for these defeated men. But I could not help watch- 
ing through the door when the dishes were brought in and I saw 
how emaciated my parents' guests were. 

"Before daybreak the soldiers left in disorder, for it was reported 
that the Prussians were approaching rapidly. Some days later the 
Prussians arrived and occupied Charmes, conducting themselves in 
their usual manner. They forced the notables of the place to climb 
on to the engines, as hostages, so that, in the event of an attack, 
they' would be massacred at the first shot. I remember the Prus- 
sians compelling us to put lights in our windows every night to 
prevent fire being opened upon them. These illuminations had noth- 
ing festive about them for they often lit up tragic scenes. All 
gatherings had been forbidden, and the sentinels in their zeal shot 
even isolated passers-by. Sometimes they fired on our windows, 
through the doors, or into the cellar windows. 

"Yes, they have indeed committed atrocities, and for this reason 
there is not a single antimilitarist in Lorraine. The Prussians are 
still our most obvious and determined enemies, and those who are 
never absent from our thoughts. 

"Their occupation, which was very long, for it lasted from the 



86 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITEES 

Barres is deeply imbued with German pMlosophy. 
That goes with his milieu, Kant-laden, Hegel-laden, 
as well as Marx-laden. His life might be summed 
up as a contest between the romantic inspirations of 
a student of things German, and the patriotic in- 
stinct of a Lorrain who has suffered from the 
Franco-German war. And as the influence of Ger- 
many may be called Romanticism and that of France 
Classicism, it is obvious that the contest has a very 
wide bearing, and is the battle between two civiliza- 
tions, two geniuses. 

The serious reader of Les Deracines is at once 
struck by the influential role played by M. Burdeau, 
the professor of philosophy at the lycee of Nancy. 
Barres himself speaks of the philosophy class **ou 
son adolescence s'enivra d'une poesie qui ressem- 
blait a de Pepouvante. ^ ^ But Burdeau himself is 
only a representative man of the elite of the pro- 
fessors of Philosophy in the University of France, 
before the coming of Bergson, men who made their 
students swallow a German pill by putting it in the 
jam of those magic words, Categorical Imperative. 

In their pride of believing in a moral law, applic- 
able to all men, at all times, and in all places, they 
ignored the point that conscience is a strictly human 
fact, and Barres, lateT on when master of himself, 
iwas to declare in Les Deracines, ^41 j a dans cette 
regie morale un element de grand orgueil — car elle 
equivaut a dire que Ton pent connaitre la regie 
applicable a tons les hommes, — et puis encore un 
germe d 'intolerance fanatique, — car concevoir une 

outbreak of war until the complete liberation of the territory, made 
on my childish mind a deep impression, and one which I put to 
immediate use, since I was elected nationalist member at twenty- 
five years of age. The memory of the unfortunate heroes of Froesch- 
viller and ReichshoflFen commanded me to fight for the French cause 
on every field, and it is for the same reason that later I opposed 
the Dreyfus party." 



MAURICE BAREES 87 

r^gle commune a tous les hommes, c^est etre fort 
tente de les y asservir pour leur bien ; — enfin il y 
a une meconnaissance totale des droits de Pindividu, 
de tout ce que la vie comporte de varie, de peu 
analogue, de spontane dans mille directions di- 
verses.*' 

It will be a long time before enough is said 
about the influence of German philosophy on Nine- 
teen Century France. Barres, in undergoing this 
influence, is only following such illustrious prede- 
cessors as Madame de Stael, Victor Cousin, Michelet, 
Quinet, Pierre Leroux, Proudhon, Taine, Renan, to 
choose only a few names. 

This German influence on Barres is in reality 
merely the influence of Rousseau in another form. 
A disciple of Descartes would call it voluptuousness, 
or perhaps the product of an Asiatic temperament. 
This strong instinctive bent towards making feel- 
ing the source of all truth, a wonderful land 
*' beyond good and eviP* ruled by that vital force 
which Fichte calls Ego, Hegel die Idee, Schelling 
Nature, Schopenhauer the Will-to-live, and Hart- 
man the Unconscious; many labels but only one 
opiate ! 

Mr. Yeats* tells us that the work of a great poeti- 
cal writer is *^the man's flight from his entire horo- 
scope, his blind struggle in the network of stars.'' 
But Barres did not tumble — at all events not at 
first — amidst the meteors of heaven. The sensuous 
languor of his nature, together with his humor, 
and his deep conviction of the flowing nature of 
things, keep him from kicking against the planets 
and escaping from himself. He, too, is of the 
opinion — 

*Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, MacmiUan, 1918. Cf. Le Chant de 
Confiance d(ms la Vie: les Amities frangaises, pp. 237-67. 



88 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

^'. . . that even saddest thoughts 
Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes 
Played deftly on a sweet-toned instrument/' 

Consequently the world with all its wondrous 
virtuosity pleases him, because the artist is a still 
greater virtuoso I 

His two books Du Sang, de la Volupte et de la 
Mort (1st edition 1894, new edition 1903) and 
Dolori et Amori Sacrum (190'3) will always be read 
by the philosopher as well as by the artist. Not only 
does Barres carry on the sentiments of youth, a 
child's sense of wonder, a feminine desire for 
novelty, into the realm of manhood, but his 
voluptuousness is so physical, his power of thinking 
in images so great, that he far surpasses Eousseau 
and the Eomantic artists on this point. Nobody 
before him had shown to such an extent that just 
as the deep self of a great writer is, as it were, a 
musical phrase full of the poignant sensitiveness of 
our consciousness, so his style gives us the intuition 
of that wonderful world of the mind whose emotions 
**are instinct with a thousand sensations, feelings 
or ideas which pervade them."* 

Barres is, to borrow once more from Bergson,t the 
writer who * Hears aside th.Q cleverly woven curtain 
from conventional ego, and shows us under this 
appearance of logic a fundamental absurdity, under 
this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite 
permeation of a thousand different impressions 
which have already ceased to exist, the instant they 
are named. ''J 

*Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 17-18. 

tBergson has often been reproached with ieeding a German 
thought. 

JOp. cit., p. 133. 



MAURICE BAEEES 89 

Thus when Barres writes: ^^La volupte et la mort, 
une amante, un squelette sont les seules ressources 
serieuses pour secouer notre pauvre machine, ''* he 
gives us Hegel's doctrine of the identity of con- 
traries: love of life being synonymous with love 
of death, in a way that brings it down to the level 
of all. 

But we can never be quite sure that Barres is not 
laughing at us. This egotist in Asiatic dress 
harbors a free and daring spirit which is always 
full of energy, and is sometimes as biting as Swift's. 
The starry remoteness of his philosophic standpoint 
did not prevent his entering the world of politics. 
As early as 1889 M. Barres was elected one of the 
deputies of Nancy, and from that time onwards he 
has never ceased to try and prove Disraeli's famous 
saying, * ^ The world was never conquered by intrigue, 
it was conquered by faith. ' ' 

*^We want an Ideal," wrote Barres in his 
Cocarde (15th September 1894), and he found this 
ideal in patriotism. Before 1914 it was easy to call 
such feeling jingoism: but to-day the salvation of 
civilization is that steady flame of patriotism which 
burns in every soldier of France. 

Barres gets his love of action from the state of 
modern society in which he lives. Life in French 
society is an incessant struggle. 

In England it is not sufficiently realized how the 
French Revolution of 1789, and the different revolu- 
tions of the Nineteenth Century, by breaking up the 
molds of society, let loose all kinds of ambitions, 
showed the citizens countless possibilities, stimulated 
every kind of activity, offered every imaginable 
temptation. To ignore the fact is to be incapable of 

*Du Sang, de la Volupte et de la Mort. 



90 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

understanding Balzac and Ms heroes, while Stend- 
hal on the one hand and Jules Valles on the other 
are filled with the frenzy of the ambitious man de- 
termined to arrive at all costs. Taine, in his 
Origines de la France Contemporaire, wrote the 
now famous words, '^Faire son chemin, avancer, 
parvenir, telle est maintenant la pensee qui domine 
les hommes,'^* and that Barres realized the same 
thing is abundantly shown by the series of studies 
called De Hegel aux Cantines du Nord. This little 
book is indeed an admirable commentary on the 
Barres of 1894, and shows how his dilletantism was 
really stoicism in disguise. 

**Le cynisme confine a la chastete,'' Flaubert 
wrote one day to Georges Sand.f ^^ Innocence and 
uncleanliness may go together," Meredith remarks 
in Rhoda Fleming; and these sayings of two great 
novelists are far-reaching: they prove La Roche- 
foucauld's theory that it is impossible to disentangle 
our vices from our virtues; they confirm the 
theory of William James and Bergson on the con- 
tinuity of our subjective states. There is in our 
personal continuum such a medley of good and bad, 
of foolishness and wisdom, so many possibilities, 
*^ silly fancies, grotesque suppositions, utterly 
irrelevant reflections,"! by the side of reason, that 
once we realize it, all the psychological theories of 
former times fall to the ground, the theory which 
divided our mind into so many faculties as well as 
the theory which accounted our mental life as 
nothing but a multitude of separate sensations. 

But if that is so, if the mind is at every stage the 

*Maurice Barrfes. De Hegel aux Cantines du Nord avec une 
Preface et des Notes d'E. Nolent. E. Sansot. Paris, 1940. 

Worrespondance entre Georges Sand et Flaubert, p. 17. Paris, 
Caiman Levy. Preface de H. Ames, 

tSee William James, Elements of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 552-553. 



MAURICE BAREES 91 

playground of simultaneous possibilities, ought not 
literary criticism to take it into account? M. Barres 
compares himself to a dramatic cast.* 

Just so! *'Who but a Hegelian historian/' asks 
William James, ^^ever pretended that reason in 
action was per se a sufficient explanation of the 
political changes in Europe?'' And in our turn we 
may ask. Who but a literary critic nurtured in the 
school of Taine will pretend that the faculte mat- 
tresse is an explanation of the works of a writer? 
And if that is so, who can doubt the prevalence in 
the long run of the man of action over the artist? 
Feeling exists for the sake of action. That feeling 
will be victorious which makes for efficiency, and 
which has been strengthened by years of habit. That 
is the theory so dear to William James and so much 
truer than La Rochefoucauld's: habit. It is the 
habits of Barres as a child, his childhood's impres- 
sions, which will conquer: habit, which with him 
is merged in the Unconscious. 

And one must not neglect the influence of Paris 
upon him. The spectacle of Paris always seething 
with excitement, the toy of every political passion 
and fashion, with its population of Balzacian ad- 
venturers all out for personal aggrandizement, or of 
charming little persons such as Berenice, strength- 
ened Barres in his subjective philosophy, and 
steeled his heart. In order to understand his own 
self, dense with multitudinous being, he needed an 
excitable, impetuous, hypercritical and sensuous 
society. He gained thereby a vivid and practical 
comprehension of the meaning of the Subconscious, 
the philosophie des unhewusten, and became inspired 

*"L'homme qui me plait," says Andre Mallere, "je le compare k 
une belle troupe dramatique ou divers heros tiennent leur role." 
(UEnnemi des Lois.). 



92 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITERS 

with that love and enthusiasm for the spirit which 
are deeper than our intellectual being, the great 
primeval force running within us like a living sap.* 
Meredith's Mrs. Lovell thinks of the French as a 
streaming banner in the jaws of storms, with 
snows among the cloud-rents and lightning in the 
chasms. Barres would welcome an imagination so 
akin to his own. There is a magic power in the 
idea of a great vital impetus, energie creatrice, 
pushing man blind-folded through life towards a 
better self. Behold, then, our egotist transformed 
into an altruist, our decadent into an heroic stump 
orator and belligerent politician who braves the 
slings and arrows of contested elections. The uni- 
verse is a great adventure for him, because he is 
the troubadour of the Subconscious, a true Berg- 
sonian. ^^The invisible breath that bears him on 
is materialized before his eyes.'' 

There was a time when Barres 's friends feared he 
would fall a victim to the so-called aesthetic move- 
ment of 1890. True, he did not wear a sunflower in 
his buttonhole; rather his own heart for daws to 
peck at. But life is not like the heroes of French 
romance, interesting only when wicked: life is the 
test of the best of our soul — like the woman we 
love. 

And such was the love of heroism within Barres 
that he made a projection of it outside himself: he 
invested with all the rare qualities of genius a man 
who at best was a kind, gentle fellow, for Gen- 
eneral Boulanger was nothing but a puppet in the 
Eands of certain peculiar fates. But, let it be said 
to Barres ' eternal honor, he never ceased to defend 
his former hero, his political chief, when he was 

*See Le Jardin de Berenice, pp. 77-78, and also De Hegel auw 
Cantines du Nord, 



MAURICE BAREES 93 

maimed and terribly bruised in the political melee. 
Barres is therefore a symbolic figure. His story 
is the history of countless young men who began 
with subjective idealism and individualism and 
ended in collectivism or nationalism; that is why 
the evolution of his books has so much significance. 
It is from the desert of his o^m soul, from the home- 
lessness of his philosophical world that Barres 
turns to the conception of another world, a world 
of moral, spiritual and at the s'ame time physical 
agencies. Nature is for him not only a wonderful 
mother, but also the spiritual tie between ourselves 
and our ancestors. Our union with nature is our 
union with them. ^^ J'ai trouve une discipline dans 
les cimetieres oil nos predecesseurs divaguaient/ ' 
wrote Barres, mth a sly dig at the Romantics. 

II. 

The study of a writer as Protean as Barres leads 
to the conclusion that all static criticism, i.e., all 
criticism which aims at fixing a mobile writer in 
one attitude, cannot but be false criticism. In 
any case, as Bergson taught, if there is time which 
passes, there is also time which lasts. In our spir- 
itual life there is a permanent self as well as a 
successive self. The history of the stages of a 
writer's development must take into account both 
the durable and the changeable. 

The critic is helped in his task by the fact that 
the study of any great writer is also the study of 
the ideas which move the universe. Plato and 
Saint Augustine, Plotinus and Descartes, are our 
contemporaries. The moral powers of the universe 
surround and protect us: they burst the setting 
which confines the thinker and the poet and be- 



94 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

hind which stretches the infinite perspective of the 
world — just like those pictures of the old masters 
in which we see nature painted to show the ^ * streaks 
of the tulip ^ * and the wonderful distant landscape. 

Barres has been in turn active and acted upon. 
His surroundings have weighed upon him and he 
has still more reacted upon his surroundings. Even 
as reason and faith are mingled in the Christian 
life, so in Barres' mind is there incessant exchange 
between the world and himself, between the intel- 
lectual and the subconscious parts of his soul. 

If we read M. Barres works in strict chronological 
order without taking into account the articles he 
published between them, or the continual influence 
of politics upon his mind, we pass from VEnnemi 
des Lois (1892) or from Du Sang, de la Volupte et 
de la Mort (1894) to les Deracines (1897), and the 
ordinary reader is, to say the least, surprised at 
what appears to be a remarkable metamorphosis. 
For the Enemy of the Law, the man who used to 
say: *^ Je m 'accuse de desirer le libre essor de toutes 
mes facultes et de donner son sens complet au mot 
exister,'' has emerged as the convinced nationalist, 
the hero-worshipper, defender of tradition. The 
man who was once so proud of his isolation now 
longs to return to the atmosphere of his native 
Lorraine. The man who seemed to be the very 
embodiment of a-moral ambition has but one de- 
sire — to continue by speeches and propaganda the 
work of those ancestors whose blood flows in his 
veins. 

Les Deracines, one of the best of Barres' books, 
describes the adventures of seven pupils at the 
Nancy lycee who set out to seek their fortunes in 
Paris far from their native Lorraine, all victims 
of the uprooting philosophy of M. Bouteiller. 



MAUEICE BARRES 95 

Biarres brings tlie Frencli Revolution into court 
again exactly as Taine had done. The most interest- 
ing chapter in the book is the one on Taine 's visit 
to Roemerspacher. This visit, as a matter of fact, 
really took place; it was Charles Maurras whom 
Taine went to see on account of the former's article 
in the Ohservateur frangais. The famous passage 
contains the French philosopher's eloquent words 
as he stops to look at a plane tree in the square of 
the Invalides. A nation is like a tree. Just as the 
vitality and development of this plane tree are 
ordered by its roots, the soft warm earth, then by 
the sun, then by the shade cast by the buildings 
round it, just as the tree obeys ^Hhat sublime 
philosophy which consists in the acceptance of the 
necessary things of life,'' even so the development 
of the individual or nation, who, like the plane tree, 
aims at *'une belle existence," depends upon the 
ineluctable laws of heredity and environment. 

No more individualism! For suppose your 
neighbor also sets out to give its fullest sense to 
the word existence, there will be strife between 
him and you. No, there must be a federation among 
men, for the intellectual individualist who follows 
the bent of his instincts must needs tend towards 
solidarity, and tend therefore to become a unit in 
a far wider form of individualism. 

The solution offered by Barres is that we should 
strike deeper root into our native soil. Franco- 
German philosophy impels the young men of France 
to retire within their shell of self, and thus hands 
them over to that individualism towards which they 
are already by their nature too strongly drawn. 
Such doctrine of self has not much importance in 
Germany, where men own a sheep-like obedience 
to their bad sheep-dogs. But a Frenchman, with 



96 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

his instinctive repugnance for discipline, is natu- 
rally attracted by a philosophy which appeals to his 
strongest feeling. 

Barres' solution is a ruse de guerre. He takes our 
instinctive selfishness and converts it into patri- 
otism, for in order to achieve his end he has recourse 
to another potent feeling, our desire to endure for- 
ever among our fellow men, to perpetuate our self 
in our species. *^ Let us return to the place where 
we were born and where our dead lie buried, for 
there shall we find the truth which will comfort us. * ' 

It is impossible not to be reminded here of Comte, 
whose real doctrine is expressed in the words: **Ce 
qu'il nous faut chercher, ce sont les verites qui nous 
conviennent, ' ' and of Disraeli, the English writer 
most often quoted by Barres. **The truth is,'^ says 
Disraeli, ** progress and reaction are but words to 
mystify the millions. They mean nothing, they are 
nothing; they are phrases and not facts. ''All is 
race/' 

A very deep saying which seems blazoned in lurid 
letters upon the sky by the World War. Barres has 
much in common with the statesman who wrote that, 
and who said another day, ** There is a class of 
political philosophers .... who think that they 
will elevate a nation by degrading it into a mob.** 

Both Disraeli and Barres, votaries of the Beau- 
tiful, sought in literature the means of expounding 
the same political wisdom, and which, more pow- 
erful than their egos, or rather springing from 
their deeper selves, forced them to dedicate them- 
selves to the worship of practical wisdom and 
order. * * Chacun de nos actes qui dement notre terre 
et nos morts nous enfonce dans un mensonge qui 
nous sterilise.*'* 

*Amori et Dolori Sacrum, pp. 273-282. 



MAURICE BAREES 97 

There is a famous passage in Contarini Fleming 
expounding this same political wisdom, and which 
Barres would have signed ^Svith both hands. '^ 

** Before me is the famous treatise on Human 
Nature by a professor of Konigsberg; no one has 
more profoundly meditated on the attributes of his 
subject. It is evident that, in the deep study of 
his OAvn intelligence, he has discovered a noble 
method of expounding that of others. Yet when 
I close his volumes, can I conceal from myself that 
all this time I have been studying a treatise upon 
the nature — not of man, but — of a German? 
What then? Is the German a different animal from 
the Italian? . . . 

*^The most successful legislators are those who 
have consulted the genius of the people . . . one 
thing is quite certain, that the system we have hith- 
erto pursued to attain a knowledge of man has en- 
tirely failed. ... To study man from the past is to 
suppose that man is ever the same animal, which I 
do not. Those who speculated upon the career of 
Napoleon had ever a dog's-earned annalist to 
refer to. The past equally proved that he was 
both a Cromwell and a Washington. Prophetic 
past! He turned out to be the first. But suppose 
he had been neither; suppose he had proved a 
Sylla?'^ . . . etc. {Contarini Fleming. Part the 
Sixth, Ch. I.) 

Anyone who reads M. Barres^ pilgrimages to 
'Domremy or to Saint Odile, All Souls' Day in 
Lorraine, Au Service de VAllemagne, Coll&tte 
Baudoche, fresh from the perverse subtlety of le 
Jardin de Berenice, or the anarchist declarations of 
VEnnemi des Lois, will easily understand how ill- 
meaning critics seized upon his attitude in the Drey- 
fus case as a means of attack upon Barres himself 



98 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

and as an instrument for reproacliing liim with tlie 
instability of his doctrine. 

And yet Barres made no recantation : it is merely 
the normal development of an extremely rich and 
complex personality, whose very richness and com- 
plexity were bound to lead from cult of self to cult 
of ancestors, from individualism to nationalism by 
way of determinism. (^^Je lui ai expose quelques- 
unes des theses deterministes, connues aujourd^hui 
sous le nom de nationalisme. ' ' Voyage de Sparte, 
p. 123.). 

But just as nationalism is a form of exoticism, as 
Nietzsche put it, so Barres' traditionalism is a form 
of his Germanism. He was the first to point out 
the danger for the French mind of being towed 
into the great unknown sea of thought by German 
philosophers. And if he thundered so finely against 
certain doctrines of Kantian philosophy, it was be- 
cause he knew by experience the dangers of these 
so-called transcendental truths which have nothing 
to do with reality. 

The analytic power of his mind, his insatiable 
curiosity, his passion for understanding everything, 
together with a strong perception of the vanity of 
all things in this world, have become fused in lan 
enlightened patriotism, and a deep-rooted civic 
sense, because his intelligence and his temperament 
showed him that here on earth nothing is isolated, 
nothing finite, but that each one of us is merely a 
phase in a scheme of indefinite development. The 
enterprise may appear paradoxical, for by using 
self-love, which is necessity, and Taine's theories, 
which are pure determinism, Barres succeeded 
in creating for himself **an instrument of free- 
dom.'' 

Feeling, then, in the depths of his being, that all 



MAURICE BARRES 99 

things but race fade and pass away, above all obedi- 
ent to that great contemporary French movement, 
that so much more than socialistic social growth 
of France, seeking by every means in his power 
to restore that equilibrium of mind lost in 1789, 
Barres is far from wishing to impose immobility 
upon the world. The aim of his nationalism is to 
respect the divergencies of men, and to organize the 
social relations between his own personality and 
the personality of others. His nationalism is the 
true intuitiveness of the poet in whom lies ferment- 
ing the living intellect of a whole race. When, as 
a kind of explanation of his so-called conversion, 
he says, ^^Penser solitairement, c'est s'acheminer 
a penser solidairement, " the saying, for all its neat- 
ness, may be taken literally. 

It is hardly necessary to point out the strong 
fesemblance his thought bears to Bergson's philos- 
ophy. Bergson writes: ^'Que sommes-nous en effet, 
qu'est-ce-que notre caractere sinon la condensation 
de rhistoire que nous avons regue depuis notre 
naissance, avant notre naissance meme, puisque 
nous apportons avec nous des dispositions pre- 
natales? Sans doute nous ne pensons qu'avec une 
petite partie de notre passe; mais c^est avec notre 
passe tout entier, y compris notre courbure d'ame 
originelle, que nous desirous, voulons, agissons.^' 

That is to say, we are determined by our ancestors 
— they are the well-springs of that subconscious- 
ness upon which we must always draw if we would 
live in beauty. Geologists tell us that there some- 
times exists under the bed of a stream (which is 
often the creation of man) another deeper stream 
which never runs dry, while the first is easily ex- 
hausted by the sun. Even so with the two person- 
alities of Barres. Under the superficial, somewhat 



100 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

artificial Baudelairian, impeded by rather ill- 
matched qualities, there flows that deeper feeling 
which is the accumulated gift handed down from 
generation to generation. Barres saw that his mind 
was covered with scraps from Michelet, Saint- 
Beuve, Baudelaire, Stendhal or Renan, not to men- 
tion the German philosophers and foreign scenes; 
but through the very comprehension of so many 
different souls, he felt the more strongly the strength 
of the bonds holding him to his own country. On 
the one hand were books, and activity of mind, on 
the other the uninterrupted flux of feeling; on the 
one hand deductive logic, on the other intuition — 
intuition in its true sense, a kind of mercy not 
strained and twice blest, which goes beyond the or- 
dinary forces of the intelligence. 

To study a writer with documents in hand and a 
pince-nez is but to pursue delusion. Truth can only 
be found if knowledge is sought by love. ^^L'intelli- 
gence, quelle petite chose a la surface de nous- 
memes !*' That is the leit motiv of Barres' writings. 

There again he reminds one of Disraeli. **Man 
is born to adore and to obey'' — Sidonia looks for 
hope **in what is more powerful than laws and 
institutions, and without which the best laws and 
most skilful institutions may be a dead letter and 
the very means of tyranny, in the national charac- 
ter." And again: ^^In this country since the peace, 
there has been an attempt to advocate a reconstruc- 
tion of Society on a purely rational basis. . . . There 
has been an attempt to reconstruct society on a 
basis of material motives and calculations. It has 
failed. It must ultimately have failed under any 
circumstances. . . . How limited is human reason, 
the profoundest inquirers are most conscious. We 
are not indebted to the reason of man for any of 



MAURICE BAREES 101 

the great achievements which are the landmarks of 
human action and human progress. It was not Rea- 
son that besieged Troy; it was not Reason that sent 
forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the 
world, that inspired the Crusades, that instituted 
the monastic orders; it was not Reason that pro- 
duced the Jesuits ; above all, it was not Reason that 
created the French Revolution/' {Coning shy.) 

So many unexpressed and unexpressible feelings 
regulate our actions. Life is not literature; life 
runs underground, as it were ; and the best reason- 
ing in the world is the impudent dragoman of the 
mystery of reality. Plato's cave-dwellers, who turn 
their backs upon life, are the emblem of all those 
who see the world only through the cinematograph 
extracts made for them by their minds. 

Barres is not one man but a multitude : the mass 
of all those Lorrains who for centuries past have 
defended their possessions against every invasion. 
His greatness, his humor, are the greatness, the 
humor, of all those fine men, his ancestors, who were 
individualists, too, in the best sense, since it was 
their business to hand down intact to their descend- 
ants the land w*hich they had ploughed and shielded 
from the barbarians. 

This is by no means saying that Barres' person- 
ality establishes the truth of Taine's famous theory 
of environment creating character. Not every Lor- 
raine is a Barres, and the explanation by means of 
climate and soil is far too simple to contain com- 
plete truth. The complex nature of such a man as 
Barres is due to numberless causes which will 
always remain mysterious. It may be disputed 
whether he was created by Lorraine, but there is no 
doubt about his having created Lorraine for us. 
However strongly we may be formed by our dead, 



102 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

we always bring with us some original element, 
something free, which all the reasoning in the world 
cannot create or destroy. 

The importance Taine attaches to race and climate 
could be much more readily attributed to intellectual 
environment, the literary atmosphere of a given 
time which influences you as you breathe it in, every- 
where you go. The Parisian atmosphere of 1885 to 
1895 was Marx-laden, Hegel-laden, and Napoleon- 
laden. That is the explanation of the socialism of 
the time and of Boulangism. Barres seems to sum 
up all these influences in his person with an added 
indefinable chanacteristic which gives him a place 
by himself in his nation, I mean that acute sensi- 
tiveness which the baseness and pettiness of life 
forces to take refuge in preaching traditionalism. 
So, for once. Dr. Johnson, Patriotism is not the last 
refuge of a scoundrel! 

Biarres hymns energy, respect of tradition, Cor- 
neille's honor, PascaPs thought, Eacine's love: 
noble themes all of them and well suited to touch 
our hearts, but at bottom ambiguous formulas and 
which may be understood in a ditferent light by the 
various worlds reading them. Neither love nor the 
cult of energy are moral forces, properly speaking. 
The honor so dear to Corneille is a convenient ticket 
for pasting over several rather villainous actions. 
And traditionalism lamounts to saying that the salu- 
tary errors which have turned out well in the past 
have become truths. Barres' triumph is the tri- 
umph of Pragmatism. The man who had so 
much to say in praise of the beauty of the laws 
of decadence and death has ended by building 
an altar to energy as manifest in the defense 
of Motherland. There are certain truths which 
are necessary to the human mind. Pragmatism 



MAURICE BAREES 103 

is a need of the mind wMcli must be satisfied. 
But our nature has another need, that of be- 
lieving in the objectivity of truth. Are two thou- 
sand years of Christianity founded upon an halluci- 
nation of Mary Magdalene? What foundation can 
we give to morality when we separate it from the 
religious ideas to which it has been attached for 
centuries past? 

Hence, then, the hero-worshipper in Barres and 
his hatred of all that is energy-sapping. One has 
only to look at his face, its pallor, its energy, the 
eagle-like nose, the firm chin; the whole breathes 
disdain for all those arm-chair politicians who have 
had no influence upon their time, for all those poets 
who have died in their garret, and for the so-called 
heroes who have never conquered anything, not 
even their own ego. One realizes the pleasure that 
such a man must get out of electoral committee- 
meetings, political fights, and even out of the public- 
houses wherein votes are brewed. Persons in 
drawing-rooms may be pitch-forked into high places, 
but not into high resolutions. In order to be strong, 
a man must be battered and buffeted by the storms 
of political life. Every faith implies a determina- 
tion to believe, a parti-pris. There is no doctrine 
in existence which can resist the dialectic of the man 
who is resolved not to accept it. Principles are 
affairs of feeling and it is for them that men lay 
down their lives. *^We have an incapacity of proof 
insurmountable by all dogmatism. We have an idea 
of truth invincible to all skepticism."* 
• » # # • 

Is there a poetic view of the world? That ques- 
tion has been lately asked and brilliantly answered 
by Professor Herford. A study of Maurice Barres 

♦Pascal. 



104 SOME MODERN FEENCH WEITERS 

confirms the English scholar's laffirmative; not only 
there is, but there needs necessarily be, a poetic 
view of the world. Feeling is of more account than 
logic; enthusiasm is the true core of reality. Our 
constantly straying reason is in its essence incap- 
able of facilitating in any way the achievement of 
that superior being which we are striving to attain, 
and of which logic cannot even suspect the existence. 
Barres is convinced that syllogism and analysis are 
valuable only in a certain restricted sphere of art, 
and this has led him to take the road leading back 
to his own Lorraine, to the cemetery where his own 
dead lie. In reality his cult of the dead is his way 
of saying *' Charity begins at home.'' So **The 
Enemy of the Law" has become the Defender of 
Tradition. The philosophy of the communion with 
the dead, profoundly poetic as it is, brings us near 
to the philosophy of Comte on the one hand, and of 
the mystics on the other. The self, that indispens- 
able factor in the world's organism, depository of 
the life of its forefathers, sees at the same time a 
creation so deeply saturated with the spirit of God, 
that even the presence of evil does not prevent its 
hymning the Eternal Wisdom, which, despite .ap- 
pearances, triumphs in the end. 

It is in this light that we must understand a 
much criticized passage in one of his later books, 
*'La Colline inspiree/' ''L'univers est pergu par 
Vintras d'une maniere qu'il n'a pas inventee et qui 
jadis etait celle du plus grand nombre des hommes. 
. . . Vintras exprime chez eux le sens du supra- 
naturel. II renverse, nie, les obstacles eleves entre 
1 'instinct des ames et le mouvement spontane de 
1 'esprit. II fournit a ses fideles le chant hbera- 
teur."* These lines show the latest, though I think 

*La Colline inspirSe, p. 209. 



MAURICE BARRES 105 

not the last, stage in Barres' mystic development, 
where he believes in primitive inspiration of 
humanity. 

All that distress of the analyst who declared that 
life was meaningless, has faded into the joy of the 
sensitive artist who declares that feeling is not only 
the best guide through life by reason of its intuitive 
action, but the best interpreter of that divinity 
which has ever appealed to men by the ineffable 
spectacles of nature and by the still more baffling 
mysteries of genius and liberty. As Barres himself 
wrote in La Mobilisation du divin:* 

^'Arbres fatidiques, dames Fees des prairies et 
des sources, mysterieuse respiration des bois, vent du 
soir qui passe a travers les taillis, 6 sentiments frag- 
mentaires ! Je ne vols pas dans la nature les dieux 
tout formes des Anciens, mais elle est pleinepourmoi 
de dieux a demi defaits. Toute une vegetation sub- 
siste au fond de nos coeurs, tout un univers sub- 
merge. Ames du purgatoire, aieux qui reclament 
des libations sur leurs tertres, genies des lieux et 
mes propres sentiments reveilles, toutes les epaves 
de la vieille race m'appellent. ... II faut degager 
et unifier tout le domaine du sacre . . . c'est Pheure 
d^achever la reconciliation des dieux vaincus et des 
Saints. . . . Pour maintenir la spiritualite de la 
race, je demande une alliance du sentiment oatho- 
lique avec Pesprit de la terre.'* 



Note. — Barres was born on September 22nd, 1862, at Charmes 
8ur Moselle (Vosges). 

On his mother's side (Mile. Luxer) he belongs to one of the oldest 
families of Lorraine. His father's family is of Auvergnat origin. 
From 1550 the Barrds name is to be found in the registers of Blesle 
( Haute-Loire ) . For generations, father and son, the Barrds were 
royal notaries. Barres's enemies have found pleasure in calling him 
a Portuguese Jew. The Portuguese ending Barres, together with the 
writer's profile seem to be the most important factors in this 

*La grande pitie des eglises de France, 1914. 



106 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

attempt at genealogy, together with a desire to wound a national 
writer. The Barr§s family takes its name from a little commune of 
Mur-de-Barrez — and for those who are interested in questions of 
atavism and eugenics, it is as well to add here that the country of 
Auvergne is old Celtic territory which, like so many regions in the 
south of France, bears the marks of Saracen infiltration. Many are 
the villages in this district where the men and women are an Arab 
type. The partisans of the race theory may explain in this way the 
mystical philosophy of Barr§9, for it was the Arab philosophers of 
the Middle Ages who analyzed with such wonderful precision the 
mysterious communion of the soul with God. 

The novelist's great-grandfather, officier de sante et conseiller 
general of la Haute Loire, published in 1801 a topographical descrip- 
tion of the Canton of Blesle. He had three sons. The youngest of 
these, J. Baptiste Auguste Barres, who was born on the 25th July, 
1784, enrolled in the corps de velites which Bonaparte created in 
1804. 

Travelling in the east of France, he married at Charme-sur- 
Moselle, Mademoiselle Barlier, whose father and grandfather had 
been members of the Council of that district. Of this marriage was 
born Auguste Barres, who, after taking his degree as civil engineer 
in the Ecole Centrale, and after two years of travel, returned to 
settle at Charmes, where he married Mademoiselle Luxer, These 
are the parents of Maurice Barres. 



PAUL BOUEGET 

AMONG modern French writers no one has suf- 
fered more at the hands of his critics than 
M. Paul Bourget. It may be that the gen- 
eral public, in crying out for individuality, has 
impaired, or rather debased, the critical faculty of 
our literary judges. Certain it is that our modern 
Aristarchs seem to care more for adorning and gild- 
ing their o^vn self-made halo than that of the writers 
they depict. Authors are no longer reviewed for 
their own sake, but ^*ad majorem critici gloriam/' 
But nothing could be further from the truth than 
such a rhetorical, self-satisfied, self-seeking criti- 
cism. All writers are not martyrs broken on the 
wheel of style, — far from it, — nevertheless they 
must be studied with piety and touched with rever- 
ential hands. 

To call M. Bourget a regenerated infidel, to com- 
pose a diptych in which we see him — ^on one side 
a pagan worshipping a Parisian Venus, and on the 
other a Father of the Church, a miter on his head 
and a crosier in his hand, may appeal to our sense 
of antithesis. But to one for whom life is a mystery 
at every moment, and whom the conditions of human 
existence fill with anxious gravity, such criticisms 
appear less than futile. 

The truth is that M. Bourget is a firm believer 
in science to-day, just as he was twenty years ago. 
Genuine, open-minded investigator as he is, his 

107 



108 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

great, Ms poignant, originality consists in accepting 
the scientific dogmas of our time, while clinging 
to his spiritual convictions. The writer he reminds 
one most of is Taine, Taine in the last years of his 
life. He began by casting a philosophical doubt 
over all things. He adores facts, science, and medi- 
cine, which he studies with tireless ardor. Besides, 
he himself declares he is a fervent disciple of Taine 
and in his preface to the final edition of his Essais 
de Psychologie Contemporaine he places his collec- 
tion of studies under the patronage of the great 
positivist philosopher. All his strength and all his 
weakness come from that. Paul Bourget is far too 
often inclined to show us the works of the human 
machine and set them moving while we watch; he 
too often allows himself to be impressed by the 
mask of gravity worn by doctors and scholars; he 
likes to wear it himself sometimes.* It would be 
good for him to read Moliere frequently. He has 
an immense respect for abundant medical erudition ; 
no doubt a good thing in itself, but which at times 
becomes really comic when brought into play at the 
most interesting point in his books. He runs it 
too hard, just as formerly he ran Spinoza too hard, 
as if that great philosopher had diagnosed once and 
for all the maladies of the soul. 

Bourget quotes Taine somewhere, speaking of 
this religion of science and how it thrilled him: **In 
this use of science and this conception of things, 
there are new art, new politics, new religion, and at 
the present moment it for us to seek them.'' And 
Bourget cries, as he transcribes these lines, ^*Even 
now, at this moment, I do not copy these lines with- 
out emotion. They were the creed of my youth, they 

*Cf. his comparison of le mal romantique with Graves' Disease. 
Pages de critique et de doctrine, tome I. 



PAUL BOURGET 109 

were the watch-word to whicli I subordinated all my 
efforts.'^* 

II 

M. Bourget began Ms literary career by claiming 
to be a disciple of Stendhal, and much that was 
purely instinctive in Henri Beyle's novels has at- 
tained definite maturity in Bourget 's writings. He 
was, after Taine, one of the first to recognize Sten- 
dhal as the great psychologist who could describe 
the mechanism of grief and joy susceptible of being 
played upon by love, and the succession of feelings 
that such and such a person must needs experience 
in such and such a moral state. According to Sten- 
dhal we are sensitive mechanisms acted upon by 
circumstances; and therefore the only legitimate 
way of writing a novel is to show the series of 
sensations or memories in man's mind (each of 
which is a mental impulse), which in their conflicts 
with one another drive the human being hither and 
thither, to the amusement of the cold observer. 
Stendhal discovered and tried to prove that in the 
human mind there are no two successive sensations 
which do not contradict each other. William James 
merely echoes him on this point, though it remains 
to be proved whether James had read Stendhal or 
not.f 

According to Stendhal the human mind is always 

*Paul Bourget: Les Temoignages de V experience : Revue Hebdo- 
madaire, 18 juillet 1912, pp. 307 et seq. 

t Speaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any 
given time, is always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, 
impulses pushing us one way and obstructions and inhibitions hold- 
ing us back. "Yes! Yes!" say the impulses: "No! No!" say the 
inhibitions. Few people who have not expressly reflected on the 
matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon us, 
how it can train and mould us by its restrictive pressure almost as 
if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar." — William James, 
Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 261. 



110 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

a ohaos of sensations following one upon the other 
with vertiginous rapidity. Julien Sorel, for exam- 
ple, the hero of le Rouge et le Noir, traverses every 
possible state of emotion, from egoism to sacrifice, 
hypocrisy to perfect frankness, with a facility 
which has roused the ire of the logicians. It is only 
upon reflection that one realizes the depth of 
Stendhal. 

Thus the novel, as defined by both Bourget and 
Stendhal, should contain nothing but descriptions 
of states of mind. Analytical acuteness then be- 
comes the greatest faculty of the novelist ; soliloquy 
his chosen instrument. As the characters are more 
or less marked in the '^passage d'armes^' of life, 
they match with morbid introspection the rounds 
which succeed one another in their souls. These 
characters seem to wear their hearts on their 
sleeves, that they may examine them the better. 
They act, and watch themselves acting: they feel 
and examine themselves whilst feeling. 

Hence a worship of analysis for its own sake, 
and a longing for endless sensations; hence the 
portraiture of exceptional creatures, for Worldly 
Wiseman does not like to adumbrate himself; hence 
also the pursuit of criticism of the tragedies of 
love, for they are the only ones that can be ana- 
lyzed more geometrico. (The mechanical nature of 
cerebral action is never more aptly illustrated than 
by jealousy, for instance.) Hence, also, a moral 
world of fine gradations, of subtly-linked conditions 
shifting intricately as circumstances change around 
us. 

In order to obtain all these subtleties of effect 
the novelist must himself be a Proteus : argus-eyed, 
hundred-handed, able to cope with his own surging, 
swelling miscellany of facts, and a quick-change 



PAUL BOURGET 111 

artist, who lias to play as many parts as his fancy 
bids him. Thus we find M. Bourget saying one day 
to M. F. Chevassu: ^^To be perfectly happy one 
ought to live five or six lives : to know the joys of a 
monk in the cloister: those of a worldling in a 
drawing-room: those of a great general: one ought 
to taste all the emotions of active life and all those 
of intellectual life."* 

''To be perfectly happy' \f The day was to come 
when M. Bourget was to say that the sweetest words 
he had learned in the wilderness of his sensations 
were Rest and Peace; for a man who is all things 
to all men may be a very great critic, but is a sad 
nihilist at heart. Stendhal rather liked his own in- 
credulity: too many people around him believed; 
and a desire for self -portraiture was his real motive 
in writing. But M. Bourget adopted his method not 
so much for love of himself as for love of truth. 
He honestly believed that the ordinary novel of the 
Nineteenth Century was untrue to life. Balzac, for 
instance, in spite of his knowledge of the human 
heart, overdraws his characters, the lights are 
heightened, the shadows deepened. Le Pere Goriot, 
and le Pere Grandet have much of the caricature 
in them. As for the novelists of the Sand school, 
they are too romantic, too free and easy in plucking 
this fortune here and that circumstance there and 
tying them rashly to their characters. They pander 
to their readers, flatter them with childish success, 
or scare them with shocks of tragedy. But life has 
other means by which it fits the man to his circum- 
stances and makes them the fruit of his character. 
The eyes of an analyst opening on Parisian life: 
such is the genesis of his early work : and his pessi- 
mism is positivism filtered by a poet's imagination. 

*Les Parisiens by F. Chevassu, p. 172. 



112 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

But the moment was not far distant when the moral- 
ist was to appear, declaring that psychology is to 
ethics what anatomy is to therapeutics, and holding 
it his duty to prescribe after having diagnosed. 

Paul Bourget has been reproached with lack of 
imagination. On the contrary, he has an extremely 
powerful imagination, which occasionally plays him 
tricks. Doubtless the documentation of his novels 
is carried out with scrupulous care: but just as in 
his early books, Un Crime d' Amour ^ Andre Cornelis, 
Mensonges, he was hindered by his romantic fancy, 
which made him consider it chic in the highest 
degree to possess thirty-two pairs of boots and a 
dozen dress coats, or showed him as arbiter of ele- 
gance a man like Casal, who is an almost perfect 
snob; so in his second manner Bourget, still in pur- 
suit of his will o ' the wisp, constructs his characters 
far more in accordance with the decrees of a system 
in which he still believes, than in accordance with 
reality. He is always the man who wrote the Essais 
de PsycJiologie Contemporaine. He has lingered 
too long in the company of Baudelaire, Taine, 
Eenan, Flaubert, the de Goncourt brothers and 
Amiel: he has borrowed their way of looking at 
their fellow countrymen. He has considered them 
with a disdain which is apparent in all his works, 
less profound perhaps than that of Flaubert, be- 
cause M. Bourget is more Christian, but deep 
enough to confuse his vision of things. I will not 
say that M. Bourget execrates the Philistine, but 
he sees in contemporary France a collection of 
moral maladies. He says and believes that Taine 's 
method and the study of Darwin led him to Eoyal- 
ism, and made of him one of the companions of 
Charles Maurras, the new Eivarol of France, who 
for the last twenty years at least has tried to prove 



PAUL BOUEGET 113 

daily that the monarcliist solution is the only one 
in conformity with the teachings of positivism. 

It would he prohahly more correct to say, as 
Maurice Barres believes, that the human mind is all 
linked up in such a way that we each follow on in 
the steps of others, and that consequently M. Bour- 
get has elaborated judgments and works which are 
the reaction of his thought upon its surroundings. 
The fact that he has traveled further than his mas- 
ters along the road of religion shows that he has 
followed the evolution of his day. The French 
spirit had its metamorphosis before the war, and 
M. Bourget, by force of circumstances, found him- 
self in the front ranks, fighting for what he be- 
lieved to be truth and science. He himself declares 
that it was the most systematic positivism which 
made of him a traditionalist. However that may 
be, M. Bourget had learned that the moral and the 
physical law are ever in contact, that character not 
only merges into temperament but plays the most 
important part in life, that the world of the mind, 
while it rests on the foundations of the nervous 
system, yet brings us into communication with the 
Infinite. The novel must therefore be as complex 
as life itself, or rather it must perceive and express 
the relations between humanity and its environ- 
ment and customs. And alas for France, according 
to M. Bourget, where such relations are inharmoni- 
ous! Thus his great novels such as VEtape, Un 
Divorce, V Emigre, or his dramatic works la Barri- 
cade, le Trihun, are political tracts which would 
come very close to true contemporary history, were 
it not that a certain love of emphasis and effect on 
the part of the writer produce in the reader a feel- 
ing exactly opposite from the one the novelist wishes 
to create. This is hardly the place to study the 



114 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

misunderstanding whicli has endured througliout 
the Nineteenth Century in France between the in- 
tellectual elite and the commercial movement of the 
middle class. The works of the romantic poets, the 
satires of their contemporary caricaturists, the dis- 
hevelled romantic dreams of a Petrus Borel which 
have an analogy in those of Flaubert, or Gautier or 
Baudelaire, the creations of Henri Monnier, and 
Daumier or Forain, the types of Joseph Prud- 
homme, Homais, Bouvard et Pecuchet, all these 
bear witness to the uneasiness arising from mani- 
fold causes, but which is above all the product of an 
education directing youth to the study of letters 
rather than to the cult of action. In England, — 
one may make bold to say, — where the methods 
are different, you do not find that naive intellectual- 
ism which from time to time disfigured pedagogy 
in the Nineteenth Century. 

Mind is played upon by a thousand causes, by 
the character of our age, as well as by the various 
characters of our ancestors, by economic and social 
factors, by the influence of foreign countries, by the 
ever-increasing discoveries of the time, so that it 
behooves political writers and novelists not to sit 
at a great distance from their felloT\r men nor 
patronize them, but to forgive, humor and even 
admire them. That is why the reading of the likes 
and dislikes of such men as Flaubert, Taine or Bour- 
get, is an inexhaustible source of astonishment. 
Not that their criticisms were without foundation! 
The exclusive cult of Abstract Reason by a part of 
the French nation may excuse some over-coloring 
of the picture. Over and over again in M. Bour- 
get's work you find the most just and logical criti- 
cism of rationalism — of that blind confidence in 
reason held by the Eighteenth Century, of that 



PAUL BOUEGET 115 

fanaticism which furnished the guillotine with so 
many victims. No one, not even Taine, has more 
vigorously combated the Eighteenth Century ideas 
upon man in ahstracto, Bousseau's man born free 
and good. No one has shown better that the indi- 
vidual cannot be studied separately, since the human 
being is essentially a social being, existing only in 
and by society, that is to say, in and through relig- 
ion. 

Such a way of depicting life may appear to many 
a reader of Bourget profoundly tedious, cold, bald 
and even meagre. To gild the pill is a popular and 
approved art. But it is only right that this lack 
of interest, of which so many complain when reading 
Bourget, should be ascribed to the touching sincer- 
ity of the writer towards his own art, to his con- 
ception of truth. Indeed we have only to look at 
Paul Bourget 's portrait to realize the vigor and 
surprising trenchancy of his intellect. In his so- 
called master, Henri Beyle, one sees a sensual 
mouth, greedy eyes, a most fleshly, earthly comite- 
nance, a big burly fellow with something boisterous 
in his manners. M. Bourget 's face is that of a phil- 
osopher, thin, penetrating, sad, the face of a man 
endowed with an intense natural acumen, who is 
fond of bending ideas with visible effort. 

** Anatomists and physiologists, I find you every- 
where!" cried Sainte-Beuve after reading Madame 
Bovary. This intense acuteness of Bourget 's is his 
prime characteristic. But his moral preoccupation 
must never be forgotten. For his wit is the servant 
of a moral sense so highly developed that it seems 
to many of his readers to have brought him into 
self-contradiction: Bourget, the psychologist, con- 
vinced, as he appears to be, by his study of man, of 
the mechanism of the mind, parts company with 



116 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

Bourget the deeply religious Christian intent on 
leaving a higher idea of man in the minds of his 
contemporaries. The first places man in the midst 
of nature, or of Parisian life, and studies him as 
a natural product subject to natural laws: the 
second separates man from Nature and makes him 
read the laws of morality to an immoral universe. 
Man is no longer merely an intelligence obedient 
to logic, but a will conscious of moral obligations. 

But in reality Bourget treads the same path as 
William James. The great American philosopher 
realized long ago that Darwinism, far from enthron- 
ing mechanism as a universal principle, obliged us on 
the contrary to * ^ remodel the fashionable mechanical 
interpretation of consciousness."* And M. Bour- 
get, coming from another direction than William 
James, and going another way, saw quite plainly 
that our moral ego, that our ^* heart," as Pascal 
says, instead of being a source of error, was a 
living fountain of truth. The *^ heart" had had no 
place so far in the great philosophic systems. Yet 
there is no reason for refusing to come to the help 
of this poor relation, no objection to trying to 
emerge from moral nihilism by restoring some of its 
dignity to human conscience. Our knowledge, being 
only a collection of soundings, as Bergson says, is 
not the complete image of the real. The universe is 
nothing but wax we fashion as we will. It becomes. 
Reason yields to Will. Truth it is which makes 
men noble. Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. 

In the eyes of Bourget, the positivist, the Latin 
maxim is meaningless, for a disciple of Comte cannot 
but laugh at such idols as Perfect Justice, Perfect 
Liberty, Perfect Equality; in the eyes of Bourget, 

*See William James, by Howard V. Knox, p, 25. London, Con- 
stable, 1914. 



PAUL BOURGET 117 

the' Christian, it is only just. The history of 
Bourget^s evolution is as cnrious as that of Taine. 
Taine at the close of his life dared not end as 
he had begun, and asked for a Christian burial, 
because he realized that scientific laws could 
never give more than an aspect of truth.* He 
had already written: ^'The difficulty of governing 
democracies will always gain partisans for Catholi- 
cism : the underlying anxiety in sad or tender hearts 
will bring it recruits always, always the antiquity 
of possession will keep some men faithful to it. 
Those are its three roots, and experimental science 
does not teach them, since they are composed not of 
science but of feelings and needs."! M. Bourget 
has lived long enough to realize the truth of these 
words of Taine, he has seen the upgrowth of the 
philosophy of Bergson and William James. 

Indeed Taine and Bourget are living examples of 
the truth of William James's words, ^^Man needs 
a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not 
given him. ''I Even children love fights, and flying 
flags, and beating drums, as well as a general build- 
ing and storming of castles. Children show us that 
instinct in which striving is nature 's favorite game ; 
their conception of nature legitimates the emo- 
tional, poetical and practical tendencies of their 
natures so as to become a real fulcrum for their 
minds. Bourget saw that perfect truth is successful 
truth, truth which can be applied to life and tested 
by life; and the history of mankind as well as the 
facts of our daily life proved to them that truth is 
that which satisfies not only our reason but our 

*Cf. the letter written by Taine to M. Bourget on the publication 
of le Disciple. Correspondence, tome IV, p. 292. Paris, 1907. 
tTaine, Voyage en Italie, Vol. I, pp. 388-389. 
tWilliam James, Principles of Psychology, p. 315. 



118 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

whole nature, and that the beliefs we cannot do 
without are those which must be adopted at all 
cost if we are to progress. To Bourget they cer- 
tainly appear as the best proof of the divine 
effort which built man. For him and his disciples 
truth is, as it were, an inborn necessity which com- 
pels them to adopt such views as will develop our 
** impulse to take life strivingly. ' ' And, from the 
moment Bourget felt he was thus in harmony with 
the universe, he dedicated his labors to the develop- 
ment of the idea which gave him access to the divine 
and highest Powers. Indeed he could not but be 
confirmed and settled in this vaticination of his mind 
by the teaching of William James that such an 
attitude was an intelligent comprehension of 
Darwinism: vital utility is the only criterion of 
truth. Herein again we are reminded of Bergson. 

Ill 

Let us now make a rapid survey of M. Bourget 's 
work. First of all he was the novelist of Parisian 
love. No one can describe the order of such shifting 
states of mind as flit through a soul dying with its 
curiosity unsatisfied, any more than the scientist can 
describe the order of variable winds. Yet the manner 
in which M. Bourget depicts love betrays the secret 
workings of his soul; for love is but a condition of 
one 's mind : 

* ^ The blot upon the brain 
That will show itself without. ^ ' 

Love is for him the most subtle and dangerous 
deviser of our decadence, and the symbol of anarchy. 
It leads to crimes such as that committed by Armand 
de Querne on the adorable and unfortunate Helene 



PAUL BOUHGET 119 

Chazel; it even hardens sinners like Jnlien Dor- 
sennes to final impenitence. Love, that great cosmic 
force, appears to be laid by the heels, as it were, 
in a sponging house, vilified by the eternal question 
of money. Think of the life of Suzanne Moraines 
in Mensonges! 

On the one hand the immoderate love of luxury 
has unsexed most of his heroines, on the other his 
heroes know but two states — desire and satiety. 
It must not, however, be thought that M. Bourget 's 
ethics are those of the Eestoration Comedy, nor his 
standard of honor that of the betting ring. It is 
because purity is for him a type of Divine energy, 
that he has called one of his most typical books 
Mensonges, 

No nation can endure which does not sanctify 
love, the source of life, peace and happiness. Ac- 
cording to Bourget, the very foundations of society 
were never shaken as they are at the present day; 
not by pressure of famine nor by the sting of envy, 
but by the ugliness and immorality of so-called love. 
Never have the French upper class led such a wolfish 
life! Crime d' amour is a crime only because 
Armand de Querne believes in a moral responsi- 
bility. Cruelle enigme is an enigma because the 
author thinks that foulness is painful as indicative 
of the withdrawal of Divine support. U Irreparable 
is the story of a girl who dies of the gnawing 
remembrance of a stain upon her honor. Nor is 
M. Bourget merely dressing dolls for us : he knows 
his Parisians because he knows himself. His 
characters are for him typical of their circum- 
stances. What they are implies what is around 
them; the relation in which they stand to the rest 
of the world is as important as their own qualities. 
They are the children of a century of romanticism 



120 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITERS 

which has given free rein to their impulse and thus 
destroyed the tone of their character. 

Then — and it is here that he finds the greatest 
opposition to his views — M. Bonrget goes a step 
further. If anarchy reigns in the family through 
selfishness and luxury, anarchy must necessarily 
reign in society. How can it be otherwise? Others 
are affected by what I say, what I do, what I am. 
These others have their spheres of influence; so 
that a single act of mine may spread in widening 
circles through a nation. 

^^ There is no sort of wrong deed,'* writes George 
Eliot, ^^of which a man can bear the punishment 
alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the 
evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives 
are as thoroughly blended mth each other as the air 
they breathe, evil spreads as rapidly as disease." 
And throughout M. Bourget's novels, as throughout 
George Eliot's, there prevails this idea, that the 
influence of our actions extends to the remotest 
generations. M. Bourget's critics aver that this 
is but a postulate of our nature. But is not such a 
postulate in the hand worth two in the bush? 
Skepticism may be excellent in Venus or in Jupiter, 
but in the universe we inhabit we need a strongly 
built spiritual fortress, a real castle of the soul. 
Even supposing life to be a succession of dreams, 
and bad dreams at that, yet poetic justice is done 
in dreams ; our minds will have it so. Speak as you 
will, do as you please, morality must conquer. Our 
inmost self tells us that there is a moral law: ^'when 
the master of the universe has points to carry in 
his government," says Emerson, '*he impresses his 
will in the structures of minds." 

There are few words so pregnant with meaning. 
We bow like children before the spiritual because 



PAUL BOURGET 121 

it is invisible, with perhaps an afterthought that it 
may be unreal: but the spiritual is reality — the 
only reality. It works within us and around us. 
We talk of morality as something external, some- 
thing to put on at certain hours.; We talk of G-od 
as of some poor schoolmaster whose orders can be 
laughed at. We talk of destiny as of a blind and 
deaf person acting at random. But morality is our 
very life. We entertain angels unawares at every 
hour. 

However apparent such truths may be, yet half 
of mankind is busy denouncing them: their self- 
chosen part is to deny all commonly accepted 
creeds and traditions, and M. Bourget is bent on 
showing them that their wilfully disconnected spirits 
disport themselves in a vacuum apart from realities. 

For such a truth-hunter, this question of morality 
must be upheld by good solid foundations, and M. 
Bourget appeals to science for the test of his argu- 
ments and method. Thus science is the author of 
what seems to so many of his critics to be a re- 
gression. 

Far from sweeping away the questions and 
answers of his old catechism, science forced him 
to believe in the vitality of good and evil, in the 
ennobling influence of virtue. Nature from the very 
beginning of the world shows us the progress of 
mankind inscribed in the mind of the first men (the 
very gestures of the grandfather re-appearing in 
the actions of the grandson) — and for the improve- 
ment of the race. Innumerable generations devote 
themselves to the well-being of those who come 
after. Thus natural selection affords us the best 
examples of love or tradition. 

From science M. Bourget learned that reason in 
man is built up of sensations and images, and con- 



122 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

sequently borders on the dreadful realm of madness. 
Man is not a reasoning animal, but an impulsive 
one. Not only does love make him blind, but his 
passions make him squint : which is far worse. He 
even has fangs. Let us beware of rousing in him his 
wild instincts. Let us not play with ideas, which 
are real forces and cannot be brushed away like 
trifling cobwebs of the human intellect ; their effects 
never fail to show themselves sooner or later ; hence 
the responsibility of the novelist. 

Again from science M. Bourget learned that man 
is a slave to his environment. Our ego which we 
so carefully cherish has not suddenly risen out of 
space or time. Our ancestors lived on a certain 
plot of ground ; they had grown used to it ; the color 
of its river and of its sky passed as it were into 
their eyes ; the quality of its earth passed into their 
blood ; their temperament resembled its soft or hard 
soil; customs and laws were fashioned by these 
manifold influences. 

The destiny of man is ephemeral, if we consider 
the short moment of his life ; it is eternal if we think 
of the lineage of his ancestors. Thus according to 
science every human action gains in honor and grace 
by its regard to things of the past as well as to 
things that are to come. But the only links which 
connect forgotten and following up ages are chastise- 
ment of our low passions and discipline of the in- 
tellect : they are the same links which weld parts of 
empires together and make them last for ever. We 
can now understand the attitude of questioning awe 
of the writer in the face of the infinite past, pressing 
on us all round and invading our life like a tide felt 
inland. 

M. Bourget 's first wish to be everybody and 
everything had led him to desperate nihilism; his 



PAUL BOURGET 123 

temperament had been paralyzed by too many 
systems of pMlosophy, bis will was inert in the face 
of many possibilities, and bis sonl was an arid 
desert. 

But tbe human mind wishes to act and to believe, 
and M. Bourget, realizing that there are rules of 
conduct that can be ascertained from results of ex- 
periments made by men in other times and other 
countries, found a faith, to whose service he was 
willing to sacrifice his personality. 

M. Paul Bourget is a great admirer of English 
institutions and English customs. It will always 
be to the honor of England that so far she has 
given to the world the form of an ideal government, 
a government of which it might be said, as Wotton 
said of Sir Philip Sydney, ''His wit was the meas- 
ure of congruity.'^ The English gentleman is the 
perfect product of civilization. In the eyes of M. 
Bourget the best government is formed by a healthy 
and wealthy governing class, a body of men placed 
above the vulgar temptation of enriching them- 
selves, whilst by their established social rank they 
acquire an esprit de corps that prevents them from 
ever entertaining the idea of bribery and blackmail. 

French aristocracy, on the other hand, having cast 
away all power and all duties, in a fit of enthusiasm 
on the famous fourth of August, 1789, lacks that 
sense of superiority, that reserve of dignity, that 
eagerness to be in the thickest of the fight, and 
abandons to cliques of politicians the glorious task 
of governing France. The activity of the French, 
their brightness, their enthusiasm for symmetry and 
simplicity of arrangements, their passion for 
equality, have been harmful rather than beneficial 
to .them. They believed that they had the right 
to rebuild society, but, as they were not well versed 



124 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

in the practical conditions and difficulties of govern- 
ment, while at the same time they were filled with 
inspiring ideals, such novices in the art of practical 
politics played havoc in the ancient and complex 
fabric of France. 

The sovereignty of numbers is not necessarily 
supreme morality nor sound policy, for such a 
sovereignty likes change above everything; hence 
every now and then new governments and numerous 
small ^^ affairs,'' which, though not very important 
in themselves, tend nervertheless to show that 
France is, or was, suffering from that subtle disease 
which was fatal to Athens. 

Now it is easy for us to see that M. Bourget's 
love of England had led him astray, in so far as it 
rendered him blind to the fine qualities of his coun- 
tr}Tnen. An Englishman who knows his Paris as 
well as his London, Mr. Richard Whiteing, could 
have taught him (had M. Bourget read his book, 
The Life of Paris) that Paris and France were 
animated by an immense vitality. But there it is, 
England appeared to Bourget, as she did to Taine, 
a land of marvels : here was a country in the hands 
of a land- owning, wealthy, governing class, and 
extremely prosperous. (If his idea seems a little 
out-of-date it must be remembered that he has not 
visited us lately.) ^^What I am, I owe to traveling,'* 
says M. Bourget. In England he saw that politics 
cannot be a science of abstract ideas, but is an em- 
pirical art. 

IV 

** Habit is nature improved"; that might well be 
taken as the motto of M. Paul Bourget 's later 
novels, above all of UEtape. Science, conceived as 
an exalted branch of morals, year by year drew 



PAUL BOURGET 125 

this ever young novelist closer and closer to the 
Ancien Regime, and exalted him with a deep sense 
of moral obligation towards his ancestors. If such 
is the alliance between science and Old France, 
M. Bourget is surely not alone in his own camp. 
Indeed, well thronged is the school of reactionists, 
if we may call reactionary men who with a some- 
what revolutionary mind demonstrate the imperfec- 
tion and weakness of the Revolution. After Renan, 
whose dreams of aristocracy are well Imown, the 
name to cite is that of Charles Maurras, the leader 
of the Action Frangaise group. But side by side 
with the young disciples of Maurras, many of whom 
must have been killed by now, and who combined 
a free lance spirit with great literary talent, men- 
tion must be made of other writers in other schools. 
We must include such men as the Vicomte de Vogiie 
(his book, les Morts qui parlent, is only written to 
prove the power of tradition) : as the poet, Jean 
Moreas, a great traditionalist, and all the greater 
traditionalist in that he was born a Greek; as the 
critic, Emile Faguet, who in his book upon the Eight- 
eenth Century did not hesitate to speak his mind 
to a century which was ''neither Christian nor 
French'' and thus wrote the sequel to the critical 
studies of Taine. I have chosen the names of three 
writers as different as possible, in order to show 
clearly the tendencies of the modern French mind, 
at least in the greater part of France. 

It is generally recognized that James and Berg- 
son have a great influence on contemporary youth, 
but it is only fair to say that the study of Auguste 
Comte's Positivist Philosophy gave the young minds 
of 1900 their taste for facts and individuals. In 
this sense one may say that Comte's influence is 
merged in that of Bergson; both men teach that 



126 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

life overflows the framework in wMch philosophical 
systems would encase it. The influence of Bourget 
reinforced once more that of Comte. All agree on 
this point, that no human progress can be made 
unless the poor human plant avail itself of the hus- 
banded resources of a race and a country. 

Comte, with his utter contempt for all metaphys- 
ics, included in his hatred the work of the French 
Revolution, which according to him had failed to 
recognize the laws which maintain society. He be- 
lieved that man had a natural horror of order, and, 
further, that he was led by his imagination to attrib- 
ute an extraordinary power to his own dreams. 
Comte 's thought is not very distant from that of 
the pragmatists : though he would develop our self- 
control by some religious system ; that is the explan- 
ation of his admiration, expressed in the latter part 
of his life, for Catholicism, since in his eyes the 
individual exists only in and through society. His 
influence upon Charles Maurras, from this point of 
view, cannot be over-estimated. 

In the same way one may discover among the con- 
tributors to the Revue critique des Idees et des 
Livres* a certain number of soi disant agnostics who 
nevertheless profess the profoundest respect for the 
religion of their childhood, and in the same temper 
as Comte, through love of order and harmony. 

It might be as well here to remind the reader of 
Madame Adam's book Chretienne (1913) which is 
in absolute contradiction with her first book Pdienne, 
or of M. Louis Bertrand's early ;S^^. Augustin and 

*The Revue Critique des Idees et des Livres, justly famous for 
its admirable energy and enthusiasm for classic France, had gath- 
ered round it before the War a brilliant pleiad of young writers, the 
greater number of whom fell on the field of honor. Distinctions here 
are invidious: but perhaps one may say that the most talented were 
Pierre Gilbert (author of la Foret des Cippes) , Jean-Marc Bernard, 
and Lionel des Rieux. 



PAUL BOURGET 127 

his last book, Sanguis Marty rum: with their under- 
lying idea that it is Christianity which makes ns 
realize more completely than any other doctrine the 
ideals of our true nature. 

So then M. Bourget is well in the contemporary 
stream. The finesse, the acuity, of his mind make him 
like those insects (and the comparison, I am sure, 
would not displease him) whose antennse bring them 
into contact with certain of the minute vibrations 
by which space is traversed, so completely are they 
attuned to the world's harmony. There are pages 
in the Demon du Midi which seem quite prophetic, 
breathing an organic sympathy with the whole 
frame of society. That, however, is explicable, 
since, after all, society is our own intellectual con- 
struction. The war novels of M. Paul Bourget are 
cast into the world of thought not so much for our 
delight as for our instruction and improvement. 
Before the war his profound religious convictions 
gave great authority to his work, but now his theo- 
ries are based upon reasons which we understand 
unfortunately all too well. War is a reality which 
lends its force to the novelist's thesis. 

It may be that formerly such books as VEtape 
(1902), Un Divorce (1904), VEmigre (1908), some- 
times seemed like so many satirical pictures con- 
taining a certain disproportion caused by the whims 
of the painter, and M. Bourget 's brush exaggeration 
may have wearied us more than once ; but to-day his 
latest novels, le Sens de la Mart, Lazarine^ Nemesis, 
(not to mention the Demon du Midi) appear to 
speak absolute truth seen in the lurid light of pres- 
ent events. In the serene sunshine of the years 
before 1914 we could not imagine that our world 
was a bankrupt one, and all the vigor and splendor 
of Bourget 's intellect could not outdazzle the light 



128 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

of reality which showed us every man managing to 
work out his own salvation from the errors and 
follies of his age. We were even haunted by the 
thought that this epoch, which seemed to us so awful 
and decadent, would appear to our grandchildren 
delightful and even venerable, in proportion as the 
mist of distance and the dimness of their sight 
would weave garments for the past, like the Emper- 
or's new clothes of fairy story. To-day the con- 
sciousness that we live encompassed about by in- 
calculable world forces, that man must be fortified 
by bravery, purity, temperance, is borne in more 
and more heavily upon our minds, and prevents our 
shutting our eyes to the infinite which embosoms us. 
M. Bourget's war novels are hymns of praise to 
self-sacrifice- And indeed, surrounded as we are by 
men who die for us, we feel that if Time can hush 
the tumult of contemporary opinion, it cannot stay 
the preaching of a Truth which makes life worth 
living. To quote his own words: **Une loi aussi 
mysterieuse qu'universelle veut que la guerre, cette 
sanglante epreuve, soit la forme inevitable de cette 
contrainte que les individus comme les nations 
doivent subir. D'un bout a Pautre de PHistoire 
nous constatons que les peuples qui ont voulu, 
enivres de leur civilisation, s'en faire un instrument 
de jouissance et de paix, ont ete livres comme des 
proies aux peuples plus rudes. lis ont ete envahis 
et asservis. Leur renoncement, la largeur et Popu- 
lence de leur hospitalite ne les ont pas sauves, ni 
meme leur superiorite de culture, s-ils n'ont pas 
su la defendre les armes a la main. Nous ne posse- 
dons rien qui ne soit menace, des que nous n'avons 
plus Penergie de maintenir cette possession par la 
force. Toute propriete n'est qu'une conquete con- 
tinue. *' 



PAUL BOUEGET 129 

Of course no writer is perfect, and a critic might 
find in Nemesis y as in le Sens de la Mort, certain 
defects. M. Bourget reminds ns sometimes of a 
mystic giant-killer; his characters attitudinize too 
much, and the last day, in the Palazzo di Valverde, 
in Nemesis, is really like the Day of Judgment. But 
we must be grateful to a novelist who descends from 
his tripod into the actual present, and who never 
wearies of preaching that all the evils of the present 
time are the outcome of the false and selfish aims 
of man, and that their remedy lies in honesty and 
in Christianity. Such simple truths, yet so hard to 
realize ! 

Bourget is the reconciling link between Taine and 
Bergson. In fact, Taine had already prepared the 
way for Bergson by his attack upon Eeason. 

''Not only is reason not natural to man nor uni- 
versal in humanity, but its influence in the conduct 
of man and humanity is such. Save in a few cold, 
lucid intellects in which it can reign because it meets 
with no rival, it is far from playing the principal 
part; that falls to other powers born within us 
and which by right of being first occupiers keep pos- 
session of the dwelling. Reason's place therein is 
always limited and the duties it fulfils always sec- 
ondary. . . . Man's masters are physical tempera- 
ment, corporal needs, animal instinct, hereditary 
prejudice, imagination, in general the dominating 
passion, more particularly personal interest or the 
interest of family, caste or party.'' (Ancien Re- 
gime, p. 59.) 

Further, Bourget 's aim is to be above all a physi- 
ologist, as is well brought out by M. Jules Grasset's 
book, ^'L'ldee medicale dans les romans de M. Paul 
Bourget, Every reader of Bergson knows the im- 
portance he attaches to calling our attention to 



130 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

biological problems. But at the same time, as Dr. 
Grasset shows, Bourget wishes to escape from **the 
fanaticism of Science'' in exactly the same way as 
Bergson's disciples, and he opposes the order of 
mind and the order of heart to that blind impassible 
universe which can crush us, but can only do that. 

At the close of 1914, on the death of M. de Meun, 
Paul Bourget took this writer's place for a time 
on the staff of the Echo de Paris. Those who read 
his articles were able to realize the influence Berg- 
sonian ideas had upon Bourget, though here again 
we are reminded of Taine, who was always teach- 
ing that abstract ideas could be verified only by the 
results they gave, when applied. But Bourget, 
faithful to living psychology, never describes the 
brutal objective fact: he paints it as reflected 
through the souls of his characters, being convinced 
that the most exact, most precise description of any 
scene is the description of a soul-state. M. Le Roy, 
in his acute treatise on Bergson, has shown us that 
this was exactly the Bergsonian method. And this 
amounts to saying that the artist must find in 
Reality that hidden inner thing which is not ap- 
parent to the eye of the man in the street. Bru- 
netiere, in his Renaissance de VIdealisme, speaks 
practically the same language as Bergson in his 
Perception du Chang ement: — 

So that direction of thought influences a whole 
country's actions, modifies its spirit and helps to 
mold its destiny. 

Once again we come back to the humanist point 
of view; the importance of a truth is measured by 
its utility to a nation. And the test of a truth's 
utility is Will, the active soul; not intellect, the 
passive soul. 



ANATOLE FEANCE 

IN a certain country churchyard, fair as are all 
English country churchyards, one tombstone 
stands out from all the others, as a noble thought 
from the passing impressions of every day. I 
love it because some artist has engraved on it a 
sheaf of corn, and this perfect simplicity is ren- 
dered the more touching by the commonplace pre- 
tentiousness of the surrounding stones made to or- 
der by the stone-mason of the neighboring cathedral 
town. Some good husbandman died — his name is 
already effaced by yellowing lichens — but the sym- 
bol of his energy and work stands erect among the 
meadow flowers which bloom there every year. Its 
classic nudity, its homely decoration, are a perpetual 
lesson in taste to the modern mind, unbalanced as 
it is by so many different impressions, buffeted by 
so many incoherent images. In the very midst of 
the desolation wrought so remorselessly by Time 
around the little church, that sheaf of corn speaks 
of the eternal youth of Life, and so speaking robs 
Death of his terror, forcing him to abandon his 
sting. Fertility and joy reign in the spot where 
sorrow thought to rule, and this vision of the immor- 
tal wheat serves to restore its Greek serenity to the 
mind, as it dwells upon the miracles of germination, 
earth ^s fecundity, and the tomb's purification. 

Anatole France, in the midst of the modern tangle 
of ideas, is like that tombstone. Everything about 
him is simple, clear, ordered : everything is harmoni- 

131 



132 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

ously balanced. Greek serenity and charm, grace 
and pliancy: such are the qualities of all his work. 
Not for him those limitless aspirations such as ruf- 
fled the locks of three generations of romantics. 
Anatole France is concerned only with the sentient 
forms which surround and delight us; his dreams 
are only of order and harmony, transporting on to 
paper what eye and ear can seize. So great is his 
art that in reading him one is irresistibly reminded 
of Joubert's remark about Eousseau, when he said 
that no writer so well gave the impression of flesh 
wedded to mind and the delights of their union. In 
every book of Anatole France's there are magnetic 
sentences which make us well realize the physical 
voluptuousness of style. All the ardor of life finds 
in him its best interpreter. Curiously enough, his 
is the most deliberate of arts, and some critics 
have found considerable entertainment in counting 
up his borrowings; yet at the same time it is the 
very art of the unconscious. Its author has the 
power of calling up all the subconscious powers 
which exist in us, with exquisite skill selecting and 
grouping beautiful sound with subtle thought, set- 
ting side by side the rarest and most homely words. 
He is the interpreter of that ^* ordinary'' soul which 
he himself qualifies as ** desolate and longing, gentle, 
innocent, sensual, sad, dragging after it its weari- 
ness in its pursuit of illusion and hopes." So that 
it would be quite wrong to study Anatole France 
merely as an icy intellectual. His imagination is 
an emotional imagination. Man carries the world 
in his mind, but M. France seems to carry all the 
emotions of the world in his heart. That is why he, 
skeptic though he is, has seen so clearly into the 
Christian heart. A man cannot tie his shoelace with- 
out recognizing all the laws of nature, and M. Ana- 



ANATOLE FEANCE 133 

tole France, by that sensitiveness of intellect which 
makes him all things to all men, leads us into the 
magic circle wherein genius is really a larger imbib- 
ing of the common heart. 

The life of reason is only one part of our life. 
The life of feelings, which has nothing to do with 
logical reason, does not change with the course of 
centuries. That is the real torch handed on by one 
generation to the next, and Reason seems to exist 
only for the purpose of protecting the flame from 
draughts. 

To what extent, then, is Anatole France, with his 
protests against the abuse of rationalism, an anti- 
intellectual? Nothing, certainly, could be better cal- 
culated to please the French classical mind than the 
fine order of his deductions, the clearness of his 
method, and the limpidity of his style. Again, it 
may be said that all his works tend towards the 
triumph of reason. Yet the self he lauds in his 
books is after all an indecent self, cynical and non- 
moral. Now, if I am to believe M. Albert Bazaillas,* 
that self is the Unconscious. 

M. Anatole France is never tired of telling us that 
he follows only his own inclinations, for morality is 
non-existent and truth ever eludes us. ^^That know 
thyself of Greek philosophy is a great piece of fool- 
ishness '^ (Le Jar din d' Epicure). *^0h, yes, moral- 
ity! I know* — Duty! But duty is the very deuce 
to discover'' {Le Lys Rouge, p. 37). Similar pas- 
sages abound. 

But it is precisely on account of the thousand 
shades of his ever mobile temperament that Anatole 
France has been able to reflect human feelings. 
Boring down through the changing complexity of 
passions, he has arrived at the bedrock of all feel- 

•Cf. Musique et Inconscience, par Albert Bazaillas, Paris, 1908. 



134 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

ings, and acquired a wise knowledge of humanity 
which brings him near to the Greeks. The Greek 
Sophists and Protagoras declared long since that 
there is no such thing as truth, but only opinions — 
that which is shameful in one man's eyes may be 
honorable in another's. Such is the opinion of Eu- 
ripides in his famous line, when ^olus accuses his 
son Macareus of the crime of incest, and the latter 
replies, ** Where is the shameful action if its author 
judges it not soT' 

M. Anatole France merely repeats the words of 
the Greek poet in a thousand variations. 

M. Maurice Barres once wrote: **One thing is 
quite certain: that life is aimless and that man 
nevertheless needs to pursue some dream."* 

Anatole France, who knows, none better, that life 
is aimless, dreams of reincarnating in himself the 
soul of a Greek, of the age of Phidias, and of arriv- 
ing, through love of order and true proportions, at 
that perfect beauty of which the Parthenon fur- 
nished a type to the Universe. 

But Anatole France is a Parisian with an Angevin 
father, which means he has a double share of the 
mocking, delicate, sensual spirit; and the soul rein- 
carnated in him is that of Lucian or of Meleager 
rather than that of Plato. His irony has sometimes 
the cruel immobility of the masks of Greek actors; 
and his lips part in a sneer to give passage to bitter 
poisonous words lashing the odious — or ridiculous 
— sides of our existence. Yet his irony is pity's 
daughter; as he himself says, *^That same nervous 
sensitiveness which makes us weep over many 
things, makes us laugh at many others." And he 
can discern the wondrous dawn of a new humanity : 
if the marvel of Greece existed, it can exist again. 

*Voyage de 8parbe. 



ANATOLE FEANCE 135 

Minerva, who was once the incarnation of wisdom, 
perfection, beauty and taste, cannot die. Besides, 
he can find consolation for everything at the feet 
of the Venus of Milo — not infrequently the Venus 
is not even of Milo ! We remember why his Brot- 
teaux des Ilettes in The Gods Are Athirst believed 
that ^'Nature was not entirely bad/' 

This ardent neo-hellenism, this belief that the 
Greeks were the artists of the world and that with 
them all was grace, harmony, moderation and wis- 
dom, which never failed to support Anatole France 
in the highly heterogeneous society in which he 
moved, comes to him from several sources ; not only 
from a certain milieu in which he lived, but also 
from himself, from his true foundation, — that is to 
say, from certain ancestral habits, not of thought, 
but of feeling. 

In order to understand Anatole France one must 
first be acquainted with the efforts of an important 
group of French writers who, some in order to be 
rid of what they call the Semitic virus, others aiming 
at creating a society or, if that be impossible, a liter- 
ature based on the ancient model, others again striv- 
ing to arrive at a type of beauty or reason which 
should rise superior to the variations of centuries, 
practised the religion which upheld Theophile Gau- 
tier, Taine, Eenan, or Leconte de Lisle, and which 
may be most conveniently called neo-hellenism. If 
only one could really penetrate to the depths of 
these men's minds, it would be curious to analyze 
what they understood by neo-hellenism. The feel- 
ing is eminently vague, since it is nourished upon 
ideas culled from every age, every philosophy and 
every town of Greece and Asia Minor; and yet, at 
the same time, the feeling is profound and violent, 
since it is also nourished on all the cares and all the 



136 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

hatred experienced by these men. If the Sixteenth- 
Century scholars and men of letters saw in the study 
of Greek writers a means of reacting against the 
Middle Ages and their religious teaching, and of 
thus propagating a fertile belief in the goodness and 
wisdom of nature, it is equally clear that the Nine- 
teenth-Century writers with whom we are for the 
moment concerned aimed at declaring war upon 
French Society as constituted by the Revolution of 
1789, and at the same time upon Christianity, that 
religion which Anatole France calls * ^ exterminator 
of all thought, all science, and all joy/'* 

As a matter of fact, a Ronsard in the Sixteenth 
Century can join with his friends in ceremonious 
sacrifice of a goat to Bacchus without thereby ceas- 
ing to be a Christian. His cult of antiquity is merely 
the guiding faith of his literature; that of his life is 
the Christian religion. We have to wait till mod- 
ern times, that is to say till an age when the writer 
would fain direct not only letters, but society itself, 
to see the artist's literary piety transformed into a 
veritable cult of Greece, into a living, vital religion. 
The Greece which existed and exists only in men's 
minds has been made living by the fervor of these 
French writers. The Nineteenth Century will ever 
be the century in which the Greece of Phidias was 
most adored, and in which the belief was held that 
there had once really existed a happy land in which 
men were guided by Reason. Aiiy text-book of 
French literature will give you an account of the 
return to antique art which characterises the close 
of the Eighteenth Century. It is perhaps unneces- 
sary to remind the reader of the Pompeian paintings 
in the salon in the Rue Chantereine where Bona- 
parte wooed Josephine. There is no better proof 

*Vers les temps meilleurs, II, 78. 



ANATOLE FEANCE 137 

of the hellenic atmosphere of a certain part of so- 
ciety than the fashions during the Directory and 
First Empire. Athens and Rome were then two 
wellsprings of powerful energy, and it may be said 
that many a Frenchman carefully composed his 
** sensibility'' on the lines of an antiquity he found 
in Andre Chenier, Winckelmann or even Goethe. In- 
deed, the extremely complex movement of Roman- 
ticism could not succeed in destroying Classicism, 
for the simple reason that French culture is a direct 
descendant of Greek and Latin tradition. There is 
no better proof of that than the ever-fresh fame of 
a man of genius who died in 1839 at the early age 
of twenty-nine: Maurice de Guerin. His poem le 
Centaure^ steeped as it is in a passionate feeling for 
Nature, is a better commentary than any learned 
dissertation on the enthusiasm felt then for anti- 
quity and the love for the forces of nature. 

Theophile Gautier, influenced by Andre Chenier, 
and still more influenced by his own passionate de- 
sire for voluptuousness, was able to endure his exist- 
ence of galley-slave of journalism only because he 
was upheld by his conception of Greek beauty. His 
contemporaries, Paul de St. Victor and Theodore 
de Banville, were fanatical worshippers of a Greece 
they liked to Italianize. Renan's prayer to Pallas 
Athene is only surpassed by that of Charles Maur- 
ras to the same goddess. Taine forgets his Anglo- 
mania to muse upon Greece as the only country in 
which a man may harmoniously develop his faculties. 

The desire of the true neo-hellenist to work for 
the happiness of man by freeing him from the 
shackles of religious superstition is perhaps best 
seen in Leconte de Lisle 's Poemes Antiques. It is 
true that one day master and pupil, Leconte de Lisle 
and Anatole France, were to quarrel; but even the 



138 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

noisiness of their dispute should not make us for- 
get that the favorite poet of both is Lucretius be- 
cause he, even as they, declared war upon religion, 
begetter of all evils. 

Louis Menard, Leconte de Lisle 's friend, had none 
of this fierce hatred: he believed that all religions 
were true since they were successive affirmations of 
an eternal need. Anatole France makes his Gallion 
(Sur la Pierre blanche) express the same idea: 
*^You must know, dear friends, it is not enough to 
tolerate every religion, you must honor them all, 
believe that all are holy, and all equal by reason of 
the good faith of those who profess them.^' 

The last comer to this school is M. Charles Maur- 
ras, whose Anthinea is the purest expression of that 
cult of Eeason which the Greeks alone realized. 

Among all these neo-hellenes — and my list is 
necessarily far from complete since for that a whole 
volume would be needed — Anatole France shines in 
the front rank in enthusiasm and his care of style. 
The great gods are not propitiated by analysis and 
devotion, and M. Anatole France must needs know 
it as he makes his examination of conscience; for 
he is one of those who are convinced that reason 
plays a very small part in the life of man, and that 
the great impulse which keeps the world moving is 
sentiment. And yet he worships an independent 
Eeason existing in each of us and allowing us to 
come near to the august Truth seated on the summit 
of the Universe. 

M. France is as much of a determinist as Barres, 
although both speak a different language and dwell 
in hostile camps. M. France is well aware that his 
reason is fettered by certain habits of thought con- 
tracted in his youth and in particular among the 
Parnassians. Nor does he forget that he has put his 



ANATOLE FRANCE 139 

likes and dislikes, liis revolts and anxieties, his whole 
temperament, in fact, into his neo-hellenism. He 
does not deceive himself; and that is, after all, his 
greatest characteristic in the modern world of let- 
ters. The last of the Pagans of Paris is perhaps 
the most elusive of them all. 

Once again we see that the real interest in study- 
ing a man of letters is a dramatic interest, a ques- 
tion of contest between the conflicting forces of that 
writer's soul. With Anatole France it is not merely 
the contest which exists in the thinker desirous of 
composing for himself a would-be-hellenic vision of 
the universe, and who by nature is a sentimentalist 
disillusioned before taking action, yet wishing to act. 
Nor is it merely the contest in the inner soul of every 
man seeking his true self, but who can only lend him- 
self and never wholly give, and who tries to find con- 
solation in mocking heroism and ridiculing morality. 
Nor is it merely the contest which sooner or later 
must arise in the mind of a man who is at one and the 
same time an idealist and a determinist ; of the epicu- 
rean who at one moment preaches that man wars 
upon man by an eternal immutable law, and the next 
that if men fight it cannot be through the laws of 
a mechanistic nature, since war is a transitory state 
whose ideal termination is peace. No, the dramatic 
contest is deeper laid. With Anatole France it is 
the outcome of the profound disagreement existing 
between his physical temperament and his intellec- 
tual aspirations. 

In thought M. France is the freest and most auda- 
cious of writers : to prove that would be merely to 
stave in an open door. But at the same time he is 
the least pugnacious of men: such is the testimony 
of those who know him best. His enemies would 
suggest that he is afraid of receiving blows. 



140 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

M. Fernand Calmettes, who knew M. France in- 
timately, has devoted some most interesting pages to 
him in his book Leconte de Lisle et ses Amis. M. 
Cahnettes notices, too, this discord between Anatole 
France's two selves, and tells us how the habitues 
of Leconte de Lisle *s salon were disconcerted by 
these alternating movements of advance and retreat 
— by the ardent protests of an out-and-out republi- 
can, followed by the retreat of a writer utterly hostile 
to violence and careful mainly of nothing but his 
own personal comfort. M. Calmettes has some very 
penetrating passages when he charges Anatole 
France with fleeing from that simplicity in which 
his mind was most at ease — **just as some women 
leave the man they love for another who gives them 
no pleasure '' — and a little further on M. Calmettes, 
grouping together Renan, Jules Lemaitre and Ana- 
tole France in an eloquent passage, accuses them 
all of yielding to the needs of the moral weakness 
of their age. ** There is nothing in the world or 
in life worth taking seriously or tragically. Every 
violent gesture is imbued with the ugliness of all 
exaggeration. True elegance dwells only in the gen- 
tleness of irony, in the serenity of indifference.*' 

It is true that sometimes Anatole France seems to 
attach so little value to his ideas that we realize he 
loves them for their charm rather than for the truth 
they may contain. His voluptuous intellectualism, 
product of a sinuous mobile soul, plays around ideas, 
convinced that revolutions are as useless as words, 
and that everything happens in the world by means 
of ^ ^forces which are blind, deaf, slow and irresist- 
ible, bearing all things away.'' But while we may 
admit with M. Calmettes that some of M. France's 
writings have been too indulgent towards the moral 
inertia of his day, it must always be recognized that 



ANATOLE FRANCE 141 

he is a false skeptic playing a dilettantism like an 
instrument, ear-tickling for his contemporaries, but 
playing it only so long as his heart of hearts re- 
mains unconcerned. 

He is a true Frenchman, never ceasing to fight 
for the ideas dear to the heart of every Frenchman : 
first, the idea of freedom and in particular freedom 
of the pen (on this point it is sufficient to read his 
polemic with Brunetiere in 1889 on the subject of 
Bourget's le Disciple) ; secondly, the idea of justice 
which at the time of the Dreyfus case brought the 
skeptic from his study, or if you will, the cynic from 
his tub, to plead fervently in the cause of justice; 
thirdly, the idea of the classical spirit, for our dilet- 
tante has shown in every one of his writings that the 
individual worth of every Frenchman is due in great 
part to the collective worth of his Roman-Greek an- 
cestors. To these I would add the idea of patriot- 
ism, the love of France, — France, mere des arts, des 
armes et des lois, — which inspired such eloquent 
pages from his pen during the "World War. 

Anatole France is the son of eminently pious par- 
ents, as he himself has been often pleased to tell us. 
When the time comes for relating his real biography, 
it will be seen that this skeptic has been guilty of 
more than one virtuous action. 

Those who have read le Livre de mon Ami, les 
Desirs de Jean Servien, and certain pages of la Vie 
Litteraire, may have noticed to what an extent Ana- 
tole France is a Chateaubriand who has turned out 
badly, but a Chateaubriand who is far more sincere 
than his prototype, far less vain, utterly ignorant of 
the lower feelings of Chateaubriand ; with nothing to 
fear, that is, from the criticisms of a future Jules 
Lemaitre. It would be amusing to imagine a dia- 
logue between these two epicureans in whose souls 



142 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

the battle between Christianity and paganism had 
such widely differing results. Certainly both men 
put into practice the saying which Stendhal attrib- 
utes to an Italian lady: ^^What excellent sherbet I 
and how much more delicious it would be if it were 
a sin to drink it!'^ Only, from this point of view 
Chateaubriand would appear to be the greater epi- 
curean, for he does really believe in sin. M. France, 
far more critical and more malicious, is entirely of 
Emerson's opinion. **What flutters the Church of 
Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of Boston, 
may yet be very far from touching any principle of 
faith.'' True, he declares, when studying Sainte- 
Beuve, that religion is a seasoning which improves 
the taste of voluptuousness ; and again he writes that 
George Sand and Chateaubriand knew the value 
remorse adds to pleasure ; but his epicureanism, com- 
plicated as it was by skepticism, deprived him of a 
pleasure which religion alone can give. No unbe- 
liever can really know the joys of sacrilege ; God is 
not blasphemed by a man who declares God does 
not exist. 

M. France is so convinced that mysticism pours 
its blandest perfumes over epicureanism that he has 
founded some of his books {Thais, Sur la Pierre 
blanche, La Revolte des Anges) on the idea that re- 
ligion strengthens passions by the attraction it 
lends them by condemning them. When his sinners 
confess their sins, or make their examination of con- 
science, M. France is determined his reader shall 
realize the intense pleasure such psychological exer- 
cises can give. And in this way, with supreme skill, 
he makes us collaborators of Saint Theresa and 
Ignatius of Loyola. 

It is a kind of sorcery, and his chapter of fascina- 



ANATOLE FEANCE 143 

tions is very long. He loves the marvelous, he loves 
to relate fantastic legends or pious chronicles; so 
much so that it has been truly said that his thought 
is haunted by the mysterious. A child will put a 
mask over his face to frighten himself, but M. 
France leans over his own mirror in order to be hor- 
rified at his own countenance which he distorts at 
will — and his toys are numerous. 

So that in reality there is no reproach he so little 
deserves as that most frequently hurled at him — of 
wallowing in the obscene. M. France has his sensu- 
alism exceedingly well in hand : it is intellect rather 
than anything else which is spent in his grivoiseries. 
The greatest pleasure of his so called immorality 
lies for him in its wit, and his love of order and mod- 
eration does not abandon him even in his most sin- 
gular ebullitions. His sensuality and his curiosity 
should never be separated. They are two different 
aspects of a mind ** which is a born spectator,'' and 
which wants to preserve *^the ingenuousness of the 
lounger whom everything amuses and who in an 
age of ambition can still adopt the disinterested 
curiosity of small children.'' He is not so easily 
amused, after all ! 

Sensual he doubtless is, like all those who are 
born curious, and in particular scholars. He speaks 
somewhere of the ** silent orgies" of meditation; 
and wise is the poet who prefers to sup in dreams 
with Greek beauties rather than with the flesh-and- 
blood ones of his own time. 

Anatole France is an artisan who well under- 
stands his own fortune ; or rather he avails himself 
of a certain twist of his mind, of a certain flaw in his 
constitution which he knows how to use. If his in- 
tellectual boldness knows no bounds it is because he 



144 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

is at bottom an Eighteenth-Century philosopher — 
of the earth earthy. His aim is to reinstate the 
senses in the highest place, and he therefore recog- 
nizes, affirms and preaches their rights with all 
the ardor of a Diderot. Nor does he shrink at 
times from contradicting so great a psychologist 
as La Eochefoncauld, who wrote: *^La plupart 
des femmes se rendent plutot par faiblesse que par 
passion. ' ' 

No other man has related his own life as has Ana- 
tole France. From his early youth he seems to have 
realized Montaigne ^s wisdom in describing our most 
fleeting impressions. We see him growing up in 
his father 's old bookshop on the Quai Malaquais be- 
tween the Academy and the Eue du Bac opposite the 
Louvre, in a piety-laden atmosphere. His father, 
M. Noel Thibault, was a highly respected bibliophile 
who sold rare editions for the publisher Bachelin- 
Defloreune. M. Eoger le Brun, in his biography of 
Anatole France, tells us that the shop in question 
was at No. 9 Quai Voltaire : the establishment now 
occupied by Messrs. Champion. M. Thibault pere 
had served in the gardes du corps of Charles X and 
naturally held eminently royalist opinions. One 
must have lived in provincial France and known in 
one's childhood old gentlemen who were devoted to 
the cause of the Comte de Chambord to understand 
the fidelity and loyalty which the elder branch of the 
Bourbon family kindled in the hearts of their fol- 
lowers. Anatole France's mother, **a woman of 
gentle, serious piety,'' as he says, was a native of 
Bruges, while his father was of Angevin origin ; and 
it seems to me that his parents can be often seen 
looking through the windows of his eyes. It ap- 
pears, too, that he had a very Eighteenth-Century 
grandmother ; and he is most of all what that grand- 



ANATOLE FRANCE 145 

mother made Mm, since our tastes so often skip a 
generation. Very often that Voltairean grand- 
mother plays naughty tricks on the pious mother in 
his brain. On one page we read the counsels of the 
good master to Jacques Tournebroche : *^My son, 
fear women and books for their weakness and their 
pride. Be humble of heart and spirit. God grants 
to the humble a clearer understanding than to the 
learned.^' These words, which might be culled from 
the Imitation, heighten the effect of the following 
pages which seem to express much what Apollonius 
of Tyaneas says to Saint Antoine in Flaubert ^s 
book: *^He is a simple soul, he believes in the reality 
of things ! ^ ^ All the facts of Nature are Eleusinian 
mysteries. 

One wonders whether there is any truth in the 
theory that at Stanislas College Anatole France suf- 
fered at the hands of a priest. Some critics have 
endeavored to explain his hatred of the cure by that 
reason. I think his hatred of religion comes rather 
from an antipathy in his nature. The more one 
reads Anatole France, the more is one impressed 
by his terror at the irresistible flight of time. In 
his eyes the only value of life lies in the idea of 
death threatening it at every turn. Christianity, on 
the contrary, while admitting the fugitive character 
of life, far from teaching us that we must therefore 
extract all possible pleasure from it, tells us to dis- 
dain it since it is but the troublous pilgrimage to 
an eternal existence. 

It is not my task here to analyze each of Anatole 
France's books, from his critical study of Alfred de 
Vigny in 1878, his two volumes of verse, Poemes 
Lores (1873), and les Noces Corinthiennes (1878), 
Jocaste and le Chat maigre (1879), le Crime de Syl- 
vestre Bonnard (1881), les Desirs de Jean Servien 



146 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

(1882) to les Dieux out Soif (1912) and la Revolte 
des Anges (1914). 

Anatole France lias always been what lie is to- 
day, convinced that Christianity is the enemy of all 
social and philosophic progress; convinced on the 
other hand that mankind has nothing to gain from 
revolutions. It is enough to read the four volumes 
of his Vie Litter aire (1888-92), which had consider- 
able influence upon the young minds of the day, to 
see that Anatole France has really always been the 
same. Of course there are degrees in his work, just 
as on his changing countenance : witness his attitude, 
already alluded to, during the Dreyfus affair. The 
love of a fight is a very characteristic trait of the 
Angevine race, and it comes out in M. France's skir- 
mishes with his one-time master, Leconte de Lisle, 
and his literary adversary, Emile Zola. While he 
was engaged in writing la Rotisserie de la reine 
Pedauque (1893), les Opinions de Jerome Coignard 
(1893), and le Jar din d' Epicure (1895), his love of 
a fight led him to break a lance with writers who 
really belonged to the same party as he.* 

A foreig-ner once asked Stendhal what was the 
best way to get to know France. ^^I only know one 
way : and it is not very pleasant. Spend six or eight 
months in a provincial to^vn unaccustomed to receive 
foreigners.'' And then Stendhal added, ^^Best of 
all would be to have a law suit!" M. France ac- 
cepts Stendhal's view rather differently, though at 
bottom everything turns on the Dreyfus affair. 
Those who want to see what M. France's imagina- 
tion is should read these volumes rather than Thais 

*Anatole France became a member of the French Academy in 
December, 1896, but I do not think he has often attended its meet- 
ings: the academic arm chair would hardly seem easy to him. It 
was at this period that he wrote his four volumes of Contemvporary 
History: le Mannequin d'Osier (1897), VOrme du Mail (1897), 
VAnneau d'Amethyste (1899) and M. Bergeret a Pari^ (1901). 



ANATOLE FRANCE 147 

or le Lys Rouge. Critics are never tired of main- 
taining that Anatole France has no imagination; 
they take him at his word, which is scarcely wise 
when dealing with such an ironist. On the contrary, 
Anatole France has an exceedingly powerful imagi- 
nation which transforms and magnifies the external 
world. He is for ever discovering anew that the 
things we look upon as substances have value only 
as symbols and are only ^ images changeantes dana 
Puniverselle illusion.'' If that is not imagination, 
may one ask what is? *^ Every healthy mind is a 
true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal 
monarchy. ' ' And each of us is a sensitive being en- 
dowed with unknown powers. 

Anatole France, I repeat, is very like Lucian, but 
he surpasses the Greek in the depth and pathos of 
his philosophy. In this way he is well able to un- 
derstand the aspirations of the new world which is 
now in its birth throes. His socialism is the com- 
prehension of the state of soul of a people about to 
produce something fresh, something better, some- 
thing higher and nobler. M. Calmettes gives us, 
in his book, a rather charming scene where Anatole 
France pushes the perambulator of one of his 
friend's children to enable that friend to enter into 
free discussion with M. Paul Bourget. I like to read 
something symbolical into this friendly act : even so 
would Anatole France wheel the perambulator of 
infant humanity, avoiding the jolts and ruts of the 
way, so as to allow his friends to hurl themselves 
into the ardent contests of politics with even more 
energy than he. Contact with the populace is by no 
means repugnant to him, as is proved by his political 
speeches ; but man of letters, homme de cabinet as he 
eminently is, he loses something of his weapons be- 
fore a rather stormy crowd. 



148 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

Those who seek an antidote to Anatole France's 
subtle poisons will find it in the writings of a great 
royalist writer who long considered himself a pupil 
of Anatole France, and who has always kept for 
him a boundless admiration. I mean M. Charles 
Maurras, the author of Anthinea. He too is, or once 
was, a true pagan: readers of Anthinea realized how 
enamored he was of Greek art when they saw him 
embracing the first column of the Prophyleum, or 
when they read the famous passage describing his 
last impressions of the Athens Museum. The neo- 
hellenism of these two writers has led to very dif- 
ferent results, because in Maurras it is intellect 
which predominates and in Anatole France feeling. 
Maurras believes in a Reason which rises superior 
to the variations of history and nature, and thereby 
believes in a hierarchy in art, and thereby in another 
hierarchy. While contemplating his country given 
over to parliamentarianism founded on incompetent 
and irresponsible electoral committees, he dreams 
of a new French government, founded no longer on 
selfish appetite but on Reason and Order, and he 
sees salvation only in a good king. Such a dream 
can but awaken laughter in an Anatole France who 
is in temperament much closer to the realities of 
politics and of life, and who is distrustful of dialec- 
tics and pure reason. 

To tell the truth, the French writer of whom Ana- 
tole France most reminds us is Rabelais : like Rabe- 
lais he is a scholar, a monk in the guise of a man 
of the people. The very simple feelings which 
every critic has noted are the same in both: the 
spirit of liberty so engrained in every dweller on the 
banks of the Loire, together with a sociable kind of 
instinct made up of gentleness and kindness. It 
is quite easy to imagine future generations annotat- 



ANATOLE FRANCE 149 

ing and commenting upon tlie works of Anatole 
France just as today we annotate and comment upon 
the works of the immortal Tourangeau. 

Anatole France, though older than Bergson, has 
contributed far more largely than he himself would 
be inclined to believe to the influence of Bergsonian 
philosophy. So true it is that a great spiritual cur- 
rent carries with it other streams and makes them 
tributary to itself. At first sight there would seem 
to be nothing in common between Bergsonism which 
has brought so many minds to a religious concep- 
tion of existence, and which in the eyes of some 
seems to sanction the ideal of the Catholic Church, 
and the philosophy of Anatole France with its foun- 
dation of almost incredibly perverse skepticism end- 
ing not infrequently in militant anarchy. 

But — as M. Bergson himself said when writing 
of M. Ravaisson-Mollien — what makes the agree- 
ment of two minds is less a similitude of opinion 
than a certain affinity of intellectual temperament. 
This affinity really does exist between Anatole 
France and Bergson : it is to be seen in a profound 
humanism, in their philosophy of flow and mobility, 
and again in that mistrust of human reason, which 
is also part of the spirit of their age. Those who 
have not read the French classics and do not know 
their Pascal and their Montaigne cannot really un- 
derstand these two writers. Port-Royal appears 
more than once on the horizon of our memory : when 
the abbe, Jerome Coignard, attacks all that Pascal 
attacked before him while proving the vanity of 
human institutions and expressing his disgust for 
the trognes a epee and chats fourres of justice; or 
when M. Bergson declares that intuition is far supe- 
rior to Reason, and puts us on our guard against 
words which distort reality. 



150 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

M. Bergson's conception of instinct, his theory 
that reality which is continuous, durable, and creator 
of the universe is to be found not only in con- 
scious thought but above all in the unconscious 
thoughts and instinctive actions of animals, is 
also clearly seen in Anatole France, as for ex- 
ample when Jerome Coignard declares he would 
never have signed a line of the declaration of the 
Rights of Man because of the excessive and unjust 
separation established therein between man and the 
gorilla. 

The conception of history and historical method 
which Anatole France has developed in the Preface 
of his Vie Litter aire, in Le Jar din d* Epicure, and 
les Opinions de M. Jerome Coignard, is the same we 
find in Peguy, as he doubtless had it from Berg- 
son's own lips. A fact is an essentially complex 
thing; its causes are older than the hills, so that 
no historian can flatter himself that he can present 
it in all its comj)lexity; life is far too subtle, too 
elusive — it will always escape him,! 

The fact that Anatole France has contradicted 
himself from time to time, especially when writing 
his Jeanne d^Arc, matters little. It is evident that 
that historical arrogance which calls itself scien- 
tific history, with its pretension at arriving at the 
only real truth, exasperated Anatole France, even 
as it exasperated Peguy, and the close of Vile des 
Pingouins, where he shows us history as a perpetual 
beginning again, contains the essence of his thought 
on the subject. Moreover, everything in his writ- 
ings is the outcome of the conviction that life is 
not a series of syllogisms and rational deductions, 
since our most important actions confront us sud- 
denly without our seeing their why and wherefore, 



ANATOLE FEANCE 151 

and impose themselves upon us despite the objurga- 
tions of logic. 

Must we here recognize a mystical tendency of 
a rather German fashion as Bergson's enemies have 
declared? On the contrary, these writers are nour- 
ished on the very essence of the great French moral- 
ists, and if they arrive at a mistrust of deductive 
reasoning it is by other roads than those trodden 
by the Grerman Romanticists. 

Doubtless Bergson as he grows older becomes 
more and more spiritualistic, while Anatole France 
seems to grow more and more of a skeptic. It would 
seem that from the moment when Anatole France 
laid bare the cruel attitude of God towards man 
he fell into the ironical state of mind of a Swift 
and arrived at absolute antimoralism. Bergson on 
the contrary, carried away by his fine conception 
of the vital impulse, feeling in the depths of his 
own self the mainspring of universal life, has risen 
through his enthusiasm to the Hellenic conception 
of personal immortality. In reality his work is 
rather like the atmosphere: whatever its final 
unity, there are holes in it. Critics and aviators 
know that. In any case Time and Free Will, with 
its famous theory of concrete duration by reacting 
against abstract thought, might bring the reader 
to the cultivating of feeling for feeling's sake, and 
thus to an essentially Francian vision of the world. 
Pleasure is and must be ruler of the universe: and 
that is what the heroine of M. France's les Dieux ont 
Soif shows us. It cannot be denied that the morality 
of Time and Free Will has nothing in common with 
the wise ancestral morality which governs us, be- 
cause it is the product of the experience of cen- 
turies. We know to what the insatiable desire of 



152 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

life leads. We find it in the books of M. Georges 
Sorel, who, like Anatole France and more than he, 
dreams of better days when the disciples of Marx 
and Proudhon shall hold despotic sway over the 
earth. M. Georges Sorel intentionally grafts his 
theories, and in particular his theory of the gen- 
eral strike, upon the Bergsonian theory of the 
deeper self in contradistinction to our superficial 
ego.* It would be quite easy to marshal a long series 
of texts to show that the French soul as expressed 
by the French moralists from Montaigne onwards, 
has ever been struck — when it analyzes itself — 
by the fact that we feel within us multiple beings, 
and have as it were the recollection of many ex- 
istences. There are moments when the conscious- 
ness of our identity which is founded on the testi- 
mony of memory seems to us a mere illusion, and 
in our rarer moments we find ourselves in the pres- 
ence of desires and velleities so numerous, thoughts 
so complex, that we feel we have lived several lives 
and flatter ourselves that we embrace all existence. 
The finesse of thinkers like Montaigne, Pascal, La 
Bruyere, La Eochefoucauld, is shown above all in 
their perception of the simultaneity within us of 
contrary feelings, and the subtlety of the great mod- 
ern psychologians has ever sought to note more 
and more the combination of our former with 
our present states, and the repercussions between 
the two. 

One may say that Bergson has built the solid part 
of his philosophy upon such ideas. For if the sensa- 
tion of this instant does not destroy those which 
went before, we get the impression of a continuum, 

*Cf. his books: Reflexions sur la Violence and les Illusions du 
Progres. 



ANATOLE FRANCE 153 

of a duration of moral life. On the other hand, if 
we exist only in a certain point of time, if our im- 
pressions are constantly variable, and our moral 
being ever enriching itself, if we are incapable of 
foretelling the future, we arrive at the other 
Bergonsian idea of the imponderable quality of 
mind, in opposition to the measurable quantity of 
matter. 

The impressionism and egotism of Anatole France 
are based upon similar convictions. That alone 
would suffice to show that in Bergson's theory of 
intuition there is an ardent mysticism issuing from 
those mysterious regions where the superhumaa 
alliance of the human being with the great Principle 
of all things flows out over the ruins of Dogmatism. 

The socialist in Anatole France is not far re- 
moved from the socialist in Sorel. That Cornelian 
accent we hear in Sorel is distinctly audible in cer- 
tain pages of la Vie Litteraire and proves that the 
aBstheticism of Anatole France can l\^ield a lance 
at need, and fight for a humanity with whose blem- 
ishes and flaws he is well acquainted: for he is far 
from sharing the naive Eighteenth- Century philoso- 
phy, with its faith in man's natural goodness. 

However that may be, whatever the judgment fu- 
ture generations reserve for Anatole France, he 
cannot be denied the virtues of a disinterested curi- 
osity and passion for Faith. Thereby this work has 
a moral significance. He wants to force us to con- 
quer our liberty by throwing open to all our facul- 
ties, to unconscious feeling as well as to conscious 
reasoning, a field of action hitherto too often 
neglected. The intuition he receives of universal 
life saved him from what might have been a dis- 
tressing egotism : and in the end the lesson we get 



If 



154 SOME MODERN FREN-CH WRITERS 

from his work, as from Bergson's, is a lesson of con- 
fidence in the human mind, which, by its continual 
efforts, its slow but sure progress, can ever call up 
new horizons before it. 

All the same, after reading much Anatole France 
it is good to take down Cranford. 



PAUL CLAUDEL 

ONE may say without exaggeration that in the 
English-speaking world of those who atten- 
tively follow the literary movement in France, 
M. Paul Claudel is considered a very great, if not the 
greatest, French poet of the present day. His great 
merit lies in his heing rather difficult, for the Anglo- 
Saxon public likes books over which it can ruminate, 
books which are somewhat oracular. Carlyle won 
immense renown by the way he had of emerging 
from the sybiPs cave. Another great quality of 
M. ClaudePs is that of recalling in his intuitionism, 
in his love of sensible and discordinate images, in 
his lyric joy, the great English writers such as those 
of the Cambridge school — Platonizing or Plotiniz- 
ing — and those philosophers who, like Berkeley, 
unable to conceive anything abstract, took refuge 
in that idealism — realism which alone satisfies their 
desire to know God. 

In France, M. Claudel has been so fortunate as 
to have disciples who are not only enthusiastic, but 
distinguished for their originality and moral in- 
sight, such as M. Georges Duhamel and M. Jacques 
Riviere. The terms in which these two very repre- 
sentative writers speak of Claudel remind me of M. 
Le Roy's homage to Bergson: ''The curtain drawn 
between ourselves and reality, enveloping every- 
thing including ourselves in its deceiving folds, falls 
of a sudden, as if some spell dissipated, and dis- 

155 



156 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

plays to the mind depths of light till then undreamt 
of, in which reality itself, contemplated face to face 
for the first time, stands fully revealed/' 

M. Duhamel means practically the same thing 
when he says: *^Tout dans les ecrits de M. Claudel 
semble etranger au monde des proportions cou- 
rantes/' So does M. Jacques Riviere when he 
assures us that the poet can explain the world, not 
by giving reasons, but by calling them up by his 
voice in their true order: **I1 legifere, il ordonne aux 
etres de surgir en les appelant et il fait sentir leur 
relation prof onde. ' ' So that in Claudel we are con- 
fronted not merely by a man, but by a mind- 
movement of first importance : the fermenting action 
produced by M. Claudel in his own land, the land 
par excellence of intellectualism. When we see the 
worship M. Claudel receives in certain literary cir- 
cles, we wonder if we are witnessing a brilliant 1830 
romantic movement. We are reminded for a mo- 
ment of the magnanimous, if dishevelled, battalions 
of HernanL But M. Claudel would wield his 
authority only in favor of the religion to which 
he is a convert. This aspect of him must, there- 
fore, be explained. 

In the Revue de la Jeunesse, M. Claudel has him- 
self told us the story of his conversion, on the 25th 
December, 1886, in Notre Dame, at Paris : 

*^Alors se produisit Pevenement qui domine toute 
ma vie. En un instant mon coeur fut touche et je 
crus. Je crus d'une telle force d 'adhesion, d'un tel 
soulevement de tout mon etre, d'une conviction si 
puissante, d'une telle certitude ne laissant place a 
aucune espece de doute que, depuis, tons les livres, 
tons les raisonnements, tons les hasards d'une vie 
agitee n'ont pu ebranler ma foi, ni, a vrai dire, la 
toucher. J 'avals eu tout a coup le sentiment de- 



PAUL CLAUDEL 157 

cMvant de Tlnnocence, de Peternelle enfance de 
Dieu, line revelation ineffable. En essayant, comme 
je Pai fait souvent, de reconstituer les minutes qui 
suivirent ces instants extraordinaire s, je retrouve 
les elements suivants qui cependant ne formaient 
qu'un seul eclair, une soule arme dont la Providence 
divine se servait pour atteindre et ouvrir le coeur 
d^un pauvre enfant desespere. Que les gens qui 
croient sont heureux! Si c'etait vrai pourtant! 
C^est vrai! — II m^aime, II m'appelle! Les larmes 
et les sanglots etaient venus et le chant si tendre de 
VAdeste ajoutait encore a mon emotion.'* 

Claudel was then eighteen years old, having been 
born in 1868; and the sublime vision had come not 
to a pure and simple soul, but to a fastidious Pari- 
sian artist. 

Every conversion is the secret of a conscience; 
psychologians are powerless to discover its mechan- 
ism, for the simple reason that critic and convert 
are separated by an abyss. As Claudel says so 
justly: ^^Connaitre une chose, c'est la co-naitre en 
elle.'' If, as Bergson and the spiritualists affirm, 
the soul is not an organ but animates every organ, 
not a function but master of every function, if 
it is a ray of light emanating from supreme and 
eternal Eeality, then it is quite clear that every 
conversion must be above all a mystery, we are 
faced with the problem of divine grace. Even Wil- 
liam James, as he draws up his list of converts, can 
only state, he cannot explain. The most acute 
analysis has never led to more than a realization 
that every explanation hitherto offered of the birth 
of our feelings is incomplete. The flash of intui- 
tion only serves to show us that something which 
will always escape us. ''En un instant mon coeur 
fut touche et je cms. . . . Dieu existe, il est la. 



158 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

C'est quelqu'un, c'est un etre aussi personnel que 
moi.''* 

Nor would we venture to discuss tlie most impor- 
tant fact of M. ClaudePs life were it not that lie is 
a literary artist having himself tried to explain, not 
so much certain of his states of mind as his feeling 
of walking always in the presence of God. 

And at once we are checked by a fact which will 
always astonish the enlightened public and which 
we know has deterred more than one sane reader. 
I mean the extraordinary influence M. Claudel him- 
self acknowledges of a young man who, in spite 
of his admirable end, was frankly a wretched abnor- 
mal neurotic. William James had the courage to 
create an agreement between neurasthenia and reli- 
gion. One wonders whether M. Claudel felt forti- 
fied by reading William James, when he dwelt on 
the influence exercised by Arthur Eimbaud on his 
mind. William James had spoken of the religious 
experiences realized by the use of chloroform. Are 
we to believe that the spiritual intoxication pro- 
duced by reading Arthur Eimbaud 's Illuminations 
so stimulated ClaudePs mind that it was for the 
moment identified with truth? 

^^D^autres ecrivains m'ont instruit, mais c'est 
Arthur Eimbaud seul qui m^a construit: il a ete 
pour moi le revelateur en un moment de prof ondes 
tenebres, Pilluminateur de tons les chemins de Part, 
de la religion; de sorte qu'il m'est impossible 
d'imaginer ce que j'aurais pu etre sans la rencontre 
de cet esprit angelique, certainement eclaire de la 
lumiere d'en haut. Principes, pensees, forme meme, 
je lui dois tout, et je me sens avec lui les liens qui 

*Ma Conversion. Rev. de la Jeunesse IX. 1913-1914. 



PAUL CLAUDEL 159 

peuvent nous rattaclier a un ascendant spirituel."* 
Truly the spirit bloweth whither it listeth. If 
ever there existed a precocious abnormal genius, it 
was Rimbaud ! Studies of him are not lacking, and 
it is easy to see in M. Paterne Berrichon's Life of 
Rimbaud, for example, that we are nowise in the 
presence of a Swedenborg or a Blake. With these 
we can at least understand their fascination for 
a certain type of mind nourished on a reading of 
the Bible and finding in this other reading, in mo- 
ments of really emancipating emotion, the idea of 
a sublime part to play upon earth. But in Eimbaud 
there is not the slightest trace of these powerful 
imaginations who boldly venture forth to explore 
the realm of the oversoul. The more one reads M. 
Paterne Berrichon's sympathetic memoir of Rim- 
baud, the more convinced does one become that 
Rimbaud was a poet only for a few years in his 
life, and that he was mainly a neurasthenic, the prey 
of all the suffering, hallucinations and caprices of 
a morbid nature. ^'11 exaspera son systeme senso- 
riel par le vin, par les poisons, par Paventure'' 
(P. Berrichon). 

It is not our desire to undertake here a medical 
study of Rimbaud's temperament nor of his wan- 
dering mania, his hallucinations nor his relations 
with Yerlaine, but, considering him solely from the 
literary point of view, one may say that he is the 
direct outcome of an extremely turgid literary 
Baudelairism, with the added complication of that 
venomous bitterness we see in unproductive men of 
letters. His imagination is like the vacillating flame 
of an electric lamp which is running out — now and 

*Uoewvre de Paul Claudel, par Joseph de Tonquedec, p. 134 Let- 
ter from M. Claudel to M. Paterne Berrichon. 



160 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

then a dazzling flash, then utter, profound darkness. 

M. Claudel is well aware of all this. And yet if 
he persists in seeing in Rimbaud an angelic spirit, 
he must have very potent reasons for blinding him- 
self and trying to blind us. I think these reasons 
are of various kinds. It may be that Claudel sees 
« I in Rimbaud a Claudel who has turned out badly. 

There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bunyan. 
Such a state of mind is perfectly comprehensible in 
a man of powerful imagination, such as Claudel. 
Again, on going deeper into ClaudePs Work, one 
realizes that Claudel the writer has been and still 
is influenced by Rimbaud, or by the literary group 
among whom Rimbaud takes his place. This ex- 
ceedingly curious phenomenon can only be explained 
by ClaudePs artistic vision. But it should be at 
once pointed out that Bergsonism brought tremen- 
dous reinforcement to theories which in a Rimbaud 
or a Mallarme were little more than instinctive stam- 
merings or the supercilious pose of an over-refined, 
self-conceited artist. 

Rimbaud then has two aspects : the external, which 
everyone can see : the poseur, the frenzied hysteric, 
the side those who drank with him in tenth-rate 
cafes may have seen. That is the false Rimbaud. 
Then there is the inner man : a delicate spirit dream- 
ing of spiritual purity — an angel struggling in 
earthly mire, the Rimbaud the absinthe-drinkers did 
I not see and who is probably the true Rimbaud, as 

true at any rate as the other, who is comprehensible 
only to those who, like him, seek a divine — and 
always elusive — vision. 

It is this latter Rimbaud whom Clajidel under- 
stood because of that spirit of justice existing be- 
tween loyal minds, because of a secret affinity be- 
tween their two imaginations, and also because both 



PAUL CLAUDEL 161 

their temperaments had been cultivated and wid- 
ened by the literary and philosophic theories of their 
time. 

Eimbaud, and Claudel at first, are above all domi- 
nated by their sensations, and, as always happens 
in such cases, are therefore inclined to hypostatize 
these sensations. They are born idolaters, like Bun- 
yan or Shelley. In another age these writers, whose 
lyricism seemed instinctive to ordinary readers, 
adapted their precious impressions to the forms of 
feeling of their time. The life they communicated 
to their abstractions came to them from their emo- 
tions which, however direct or sudden they might 
be, had their root in their spiritual milieu, by which 
I mean their reading and their readers, rather than 
their surroundings. That is the explanation of the 
masterpieces of a Bunyan or a Shelley. 

Rimbaud and Claudel, at a later date, appear in 
an age which, far from adding restraint to their 
genius, on the contrary countenanced their most 
extravagant flights of fancy. In spite of the silence 
of a certain University party about Baudelaire, 
sooner or later justice must be done, not perhaps 
to Baudelaire himself, but certainly to his book, 
I' Art Romantique, that inexhaustible mine of infor- 
mation for the generation after. It is by reading 
this book that one realizes how the German influence 
worked on artists in the direction indicated by 
Baudelaire. 

**La nature qui pose devant nous, de quelque cote 
que nous nous tournions, et qui nous enveloppe 
comme un mystere, se presente sous plusieurs etats 
simultanes dont chacun, selon quil est plus intelligi- 
ble, plus sensible pour nous, se reflete plus vivement 
dans nos coeurs: forme, attitude et mouvement, 
lumiere et couleur, son et harmonic. La musique 



162 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

des vers de Victor Hugo s'adapte aux profondes 
harmonies de la nature, sculpteur il decoupe dans 
ses strophes la forme inoubliable des choses ; peintre, 
11 les illumine de leur couleur propre. ..." (Page 
315, L'Art Romantique.)* 

From this triple impression, says Baudelaire, re- 
sults the morality of things. Another result is the 
preoccupation about the unconscious which has 
always held so many minds; and with it goes 
hand in hand that hatred of logic, that worship 
of nature as being the symbol of another world, 
'^nature certifying the supernatural body over- 
flowed by life,'* and finally the conception of art, 
not as the art of reason, but as the art of the un- 
conscious. 

** Beyond this universality of the symbolic lan- 
guage, Emerson says, we are apprised of the 
divineness of this superior use of things, whereby 
the world is a temple (italics are mine : — Baudelaire 
had used the same words — La nature est un tem- 
ple) whose walls are covered with emblems, pic- 
tures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that 
there is no fact in nature which does not carry the 
whole sense of nature. '* (The Poet.) 

It is possible now, on reading Rimbaud and 
Mallarme, as well as Huysmans or Villiers de Plsle 
Adam (to name the most original writers of this 
group), to understand with what ardor and frenzy 
young enthusiastic minds endeavored to find solu- 
tion to their own souls' questions. It must be com- 
pared with those religious experiences we hear of 
in America or in England. *^The rapture of the 
Moravian and Quietist, the opening of the internal 
sense of the word, in the language of the New Jeru- 

*I need not say here that Baudelaire, in trying to explain Hugo 
to the French reader, expounded his own theories. 



PAUL CLAUDEL 163 

salem Churcli; the revival of the Calvinist churches, 
the experiences of the Methodists/' are other forms 
of this mystic tendency we find in French Literature. 
This shudder of awe and delight with which the 
individual soul always mingles with the universal 
soul puts on different figures or shapes : here trances 
or illuminations, there extraordinary lyrics, a dithy- 
rambic turbulence and often — with the realization 
that the universe is but one thing of which any 
proposition may be affirmed or denied — a tendency 
to insanity. 

**What is a poet,'' asks Baudelaire, *4f not a 
translator, a decipherer? With the excellent poets 
their is no metaphor, no comparison nor epithet, 
which is not of a mathematically exact adaptation 
in the actual circumstances, because these compari- 
sons, metaphors or epithets are taken from the inex- 
haustible fund of universal analogy/'* 

These words at once remind us of Bergson's fa- 
mous passage when he wants to elicit a certain active 
force which in most men is likely to be trammelled 
by mental habits more useful to life. *'Many dif- 
ferent images, borrowed from very different orders 
of things, can, by their convergent action, direct 
consciousness to the precise point where there is 
a certain intuition to be seized," etc. (Introduction 
to Metaphysics). And here Bergson echoes Scho- 
penhauer. 

One has only to read ClaudePs poems or won- 
derful odes to realize how the poet, in trying to 
re-construct before us the inner secret workings of 
his temperament, has succeeded in plunging us into 
that inner stream in which we move when unfet- 
tered by intellectualism. The identity running 
through all the surprises of the universe is the 

*Page 315, "L'arf Romantique," 



164 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

thread which guides his mind out of the worldly 
labyrinth. 

Ne dis point que le ciel est bleu! — II est quatre heures. 
Point d'air, point de soleil! Le ciel est blanc et bleu. 
Ne dis point que je suis ici! — ^Un enfant pleure. 
Je sens I'odeur des fleurs une k une. II pleut. 

Done c'est cela le monde et c'est cela la vie! 
C'etait cela, la Mer ! et le reste est ceci. 
Passe, present, tout est conune en photographie, 
O le hasard, 6 Famertume d'etre ici! 

Est-ce toi, mon ame? Ecoute. Dis: Je suis seule. 

' — Et puis encor? L'ennui! L'ombre qui fait son tour. 

— Et puis? — La paix. Plus rien. La paix. Dis. Je suis seule 

— ^Amour — Pas amour! Ne dis pas amour! 

Amour! parce que je suis grandement malade! 
Amour! Dis: Je suis seule. Ne dis point amour! 
Hier! demain! La chose k faire? Tout est fade! 
II me dure et de moi et de vivre et du jour ! 

J'aime! Etpuis! J'aime! Et qui? Je n'aime rien, chut! J'aime! 

J'aime! Tout le monde est rentr6, voici le soir. 

La lampe se rallume et ce lieu est le mSme. 

— Que la mer dtait triste et que le ciel est noir! 

(Vers d'exil. Tome IV. Theatre.) 

4 H'l f (/ . 

And now if we turn to the Cinq grandes odes and 
plunge into L^ Esprit et I'Eau with the poet, when 
he is carried away by his thought and forgets the 
public, the critics and the authors, we worship the 
liberating god. 

**Je sens, je flaire, je debrouille, je depiste, je 
respire avec un certain sens. 

La chose conunent elle est faite! Et moi aussi 
je suis plein d'un dieu, je suis plein d 'ignorance et 
de genie I 

forces a Poeuvre autour de moi, 

J 'en sais faire autant que vous, je suis libre, je 
suis violent, je suis libre a votre maniere que les 
professeurs n'entendent pas! 

Comme Parbre au printemps nouveau chaque 
annee 



PAUL CLAUDEL 165 

Invente, travaille par son ame, 

Le vent, le meme qui est eternel, cree de rien sa 
feuille pointue, 

Moi, Phomme 

Je sais ce que je fais. 

De la poussee et de ce pouvoir meme de creation, 

J^use, je suis maitre. ..." 

How truly Bergsonian all that is ! 

Here we may hear the wings of the poet beating 
against all the sides of the solid old lumber of the 
world, but in the first poem, written under the influ- 
ence of Mallarme or Eimbaud, we have that side 
of the human soul which Sainte Beuve describes in 
his Preface to Volupte as ^ ' languissant, oisif, at- 
tachant, secret et prive, mysterieux et furtif, reveur 
jusqu'a la subtilite, tendre jusqu'a la mollesse, 
voluptueux enfin''; whilst in the second poem the 
same fire has been spiritualized, and by the side of 
that love of novelty and of the manyness* there is 
a desire to live forwards and to carry the whole 
universe in one Thought. 

** Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aristote- 
lian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for 
centuries, but human experience has boiled over 
those limits, and we now call these things only rela- 
tively true, or true within those borders of experi- 
ence. ' 't 

In the end we must always come back to that 
theory dear to William James and to Bergson which 
considers all psychical existence as of the form of 
consciousness only, for both declare or assume that 
consciousness exists independently of the physical 
world in some vast ocean of consciousness. Souls, 
Bergson declares, are continually being created, 

* Pragmatism, p. 179. 
^Pragmatism, p. 223. 



166 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

which nevertheless in a certain sense pre-existed. 
They are nothing else than the little rills into which 
the great river of life divides itself, flowing through 
the body of humanity."* 

Claudel has lived some time in America and in 
China, in surroundings where the theories of James 
and Bergson were widely discussed; and unless he 
should himself contradict us, everything inclines us 
to believe that if he declared Rimbaud was bis mas- 
ter, it is because he saw him in and through a 
certain philosophy. Rimbaud revealed the super- 
natural to him simply because others than Rimbaud, 
metaphysicians who had passed their lives in ** go- 
ing into the river and moving up and down to 
discover its depths and shallows,'' had revealed to 
him that the absence of link between such and such 
landscape, I mean between idea and image, the 
absence of ordinary logical process, put us into 
communication with the real foundation of the 
universe. 

Mais que m'importent k present vos empirea, et tout ce qui meurt, 
Puisque je suis libra! que m'importent vos arrangements cruels? 
Puisque moi du mo ins je suis libre, puisque j'ai trouve! 

Puisque moi du moins je suis dehors! 
Puisque je n'ai plus ma place avec les choses creees, mais ma part 
avec ce qui les cree, I'esprit liquide et lascif. 

{L' Esprit et VEau.) 

The world which Claudel saw in Rimbaud's writ- 
ings, lit up by the poor bull's-eye lantern of his 
imagination, would, I feel sure, have frightened the 
robust common sense of our honest convert but for 
the fact that in France, in America, and even, shall 
we say, in the small European world of Fou-Tcheou, 
French and English books declared that the sim- 

*Creative Evolution, p. 284. 



PAUL CLAUDEL 167 

plest process of thought, when we put it into words, 
is inadequate, unequal to real purpose of life, which 
is to know Eeality. 

There would be no need to dwell on such points 
were it not that M. Claudel has published his Art 
Poetique, which is nothing but a metaphysical 
treatise. In full reaction against romanticism, which 
is a literature of woe, — he, the last child of ro- 
manticism ! — wishes to testify to the livableness 
of life, and, not content with writing wonderful 
recitatives which he calls poems, he tries to rein- 
force their effect by a book written too often in an 
emphatic key of expression. Joseph de Tonquedec 
and other critics have reproached him with a want 
of literary tact, and even with writing downright 
nonsense. I wish sometimes he was quite honest 
with his reader. For instance, he tells us he has 
read Aristotle, Pascal, and we do not doubt his 
word. But when he speaks of the Greek philosopher, 
he has his tongue in his cheek. Bergson has been 
sometimes too strong for him, and when we read 
M. Eiviere's clever analysis of this book, VArt Poe- 
tique, we feel that, if Claudel is too big to slip into 
a Bergsonian formula, he has at least read Berg- 
son with enormous advantage. Claudel has much 
of the temperament of the missionary in him, but 
too often he bids the whole world stand and de- 
liver with ^^Time and Free WilP^ in one hand, by 
way of a pistol. 

**Nous ne cherchons point a comprendre le me- 
canisme des choses de par-dessous, comme un chauf- 
feur qui rampe sur le dos sous sa locomotive. Mais 
nous nous placerons devant Pensemble les cre- 
atures, comme un critique devant le produit d'un 
poete, goutant pleinement la chose, examinant par 



168 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

quels moyens il a obtenu ses effets, comme un 
peintre clignant des yeux devant Poeuvre d'un 
peintre . . /' (pp. 13-14, Art Poetique). 

And again. We realize *^une relation constante 
entre certains motifs, comme d'une fleur a sa tige, 
du bras avec la main.'^ And the whole of the first 
chapter tells us that the world ought to appear to 
us in its spontaneity, as Bergson preaches, that laws 
are means of simplification, useful processes **for 
finding out one's place in Nature's dictionary.'* 
* ' They have not in themselves any generating force 
nor necessary value." 

In order to understand the world one must have 
ever present to one's mind this idea that it is above 
all a harmony whose notes call up one another. 
^^Nous ne pouvons definir une chose, elle n'existe 
en soi que par les traits en qui elle differe de toutes 
les autres" {Art Poetique). 

Baudelaire had already written: ** There is in 
nature neither line nor color" {L^Art Romantique, 
page 17). 

*^ Every object needs all the others in order to 
exist," Claudel adds later on. Once again we are 
plunged into that continual solidarity of all beings, 
that general correspondence demonstrated by Bau- 
delaire and Bergson. And in order to underline 
as it were his adherence to the Bergson-Heraclitus 
idea, Claudel tells us that everything flows, rjdvra pd, 
and that it now flows unceasingly. 

What, then, is Time if not the unrolling of the 
agreement of all things among themselves, the mani- 
festation of their continued co-operation, the devel- 
opment of all the movements of beings? Le Temps 
est le sens de la vie. 

Compare Bergson: 

^^This inner life may be compared to the unroll- 



PAUL CLAUDEL 169 

ing of a coilj for there is no living being wlio does 
not feel MmseK coming gradually to the end of Ms 
role; and to live is to grow old. But it may just 
as well be compared to a continual rolling up, like 
that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us, 
it swells incessantly with the present that it picks 
up on its way; and consciousness means memory.'* 
(Page 10, An Introduction to Metaphysics. Transl. 
by T. E. Hulme.) 

And to remove all doubt Claudel adds: ** Under- 
neath that which begins again, there is that which 
continues. From that absolute duration our life 
is, from birth until death, a division. ' ' The further 
one reads in this Art Poetique, the more examples 
one finds of ingenious poetical variations on Berg- 
son's doctrine. 

**A11 is movement and nothing but movement, 
spirit as well as matter, and there is nothing inert 
in the world. Material beings toil at this work 
of progression by their perpetual efforts. As for 
the animal, it no longer exists ^par une simple limi- 
tation opposee du dehors il se fait du dedans lui- 
meme' " (p. 70). 

As for man, the supreme part is reserved for 
him, — that of being the conscience of things. 
Matter invokes the aid of spirit. **Et voici que 
la vie a tressailli dans son sein. Voici vegeter le 
visage. ' ' 

What, then, is ClaudePs new contribution? He 
has gone further than Bergson: he declares that 
the world is making itself for a certain intention, 
that it has an end, and that this end is willed by 
God. For Claudel the very fact that the world 
moves and passes away implies the other fact that 
there is something which doeg not pass away. Ber- 
keley had already suggested that the world is that 



170 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

which is not. And thus Claudel : ' ' Tout perit. L 'uni- 
vers n'est qu'une maniere totale de ne pas etre ce 
qui est'' (Art Poetique). But this very instability 
of the world proves God. Alone the spirit of man 
does not pass away: that is the only thing which 
subsists, except God. The animal was created as 
a toy for some determinate leap, but man that he 
might grasp the connection between the world's 
flight and God's immobility. ^^Tout passe, et rien 
n'etant present, tout doit etre represents " (p. 136). 

M. Claudel will go further still. Having once 
set out in this direction, he will follow Pascal and 
declare that we are living in a state of disorder 
and that alone the Redemption, God-made man, has 
rescued us from sin. 

Whatever opinion one may have of M. Claudel 's 
theology as theology, it certainly reaches at times 
the greatness and beauty of the great mystics. The 
soul in God embraces the whole of creation and it 
is clear, as we have already said, that with Claudel 
this desire to feel everything, to spread and dilute 
oneself into everything, took a precise shape in 
the Catholic religion. 

^*Dans cette amere vie mortelle, les plus poign- 
antes delices revelees a notre nature sont celles qui 
accompagnent la creation d'une ame par la jonction 
de deux corps. Helas! elles ne sont que 1 'image hu- 
miliee de cette etreinte substantielle ou I'ame, ap- 
prenant son nom et 1 'intention qu'elle satisfait, se 
proferera pour se livrer, s'aspirera, s'expirera tour 
a tour. continuation de notre coeur ! 6 parole in- 
communicable ! o acte dans le ciel futur! O mon 
Dieu, tu nous as montre des choses dures, tu nous 
as abreuves du vin de la penitence! Quelle prise, 
d'un empire ou d'un corps de femme entre des bras 
impitoyables, comparable a ce saisissement de Dieu 



PAUL CLAUDEL 171 

par notre ame, comme la cliaux saisit le sable !*^ 
(Pages 181-182, Art Poetique,) 

For some readers certain pages of la Connaissance 
de.VEst are ClaudePs masterpiece. La Connaissance 
de VEst is not a revelation of China, as might at 
first appear, but an immediate Bergsonian view of 
the things of the earth. The lesson of the book 
lies in showing us that the world's beauty is all 
around us in the tiny corner of it in which we hap- 
pen to live, if only we have eyes to see it. The 
infinite unfolds itself under a trained eye, in flat 
ploughed fields over which the wind chases the 
shadows of the clouds up to their boundary of blue 
hills or in a cluster of thatched roofs by the shore, 
or a clump of trees bent awry by the winds from 
the open sea. 

ClaudePs eight dramas are musical prose poems 
whose men and women are drawn certainly with 
precise characterization, but they are most of all 
men and women of all time, endowed with strong, 
symbolic meaning. A large volume could be writ- 
ten to explain the religious and moral themes, the 
leit-motiv of a philosophy which repeats its lesson 
with infinite variations. Tete d^Or is a drama 
played in every age. It is the story of every con- 
queror whose effort ^* arrive a une limite vaine se 
defait comme un pli.^' It is the eternal story of 
weakness putting its trust in strength, illustrated by 
the touching friendship between Cebes and Tete 
d'Or, La Ville is a story of strife and revolt, and 
might just as well be laid in ancient Rome as in 
France or England of to-day: it shows the power- 
lessness of individualistic civilization to satisfy the 
masses whom it merely tires, and it is one of the 
most poignant criticisms that could be found of the 
Victorian Era. 



172 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

La Jeune fille Violaine and its second version 
VAnnonce faite a Marie are naive mystic dramas 
animated with a religious fervor which makes 
twenty centuries of Christianity live under our eyes. 
L'Otage, a historical drama placed in the year 1815, 
is not only a picture of France after the Revolu- 
tion, but shows also the conception of government as 
understood by feudality. 

Georges de Coilfontaine: — Adieu done Roi que j'ai eervi. . . . 
Sygne: — Voici le Roi sur son trone. 

Georges : — L'appelez-vous le Roi ? Pour moi je ne vols qu'un Turelure 
couronne. 
Un prefet en chef administrant pour la commodite gen^rale, con- 

stitutionnel, assermente, 
Et que Ton congedie, le jour qu'on en est las.* 

Le Repos du Septihne Jour describes the visit of 
the Emperor of China to Hell and reminds one of 
a novel by Mrs. Oliphant. L'E change, of which the 
scene is laid in America, and le Part age du Midi 
are dramas of passion recalling the Tristan and 
Yseult of mediasval story as well as of Wagnerian 
drama. These plays are truly poetic arsenals 
against the modern world. They are great because 
his characters are supported by long centuries of 
tradition: his lyricism carries us back, not so much 
to Shakespeare, as has been so often said, but to 
the Bible and ^schylus. In this he reminds us of 
that writer of genius who is even yet not widely 
enough known — Villiers de PIsle Adam. 

If we study these dramas we do not find in them 
that preoccupation of self -analysis, self-study, we see 

* Georges de Coufontaine: — Farewell then, oh King whom I have 
served. 
Sygne: — Behold the King upon his throne. 

Georges: — Callest thou him the King? But I — I see only a 
crowned Turelure, 
A chief prefect, administering the general good, constitutionally, 

on oath, 
And one who will be dismissed on the day we are weary of him. 



PAUL CLAUDEL 173 

in the character of a Racine, a Marivaux, or a 
Stendhal. They are more like some of Maeterlinck's 
characters ■— in that they suggest rather than speak. 
They might even be compared with Maupassant's 
characters — so simple that they could be called 
brutish, were it not for ClaudePs constant vision 
of the over-soul. 

Art is working far ahead of language, and we do 
realize that in M. ClaudePs dramas he has recourse 
to all manner of suggestions and exaggerations of 
style — 

''Mais ap — 

— pelle L. 

— eon. Pourquoi ne parle-t-il pasT' — 

to arrive at effects for which we have not yet a 
direct name. Not that such eifects do not enter into 
the habits of everyday life, but Boileau and Victor 
Hugo have taught us to consider everything vague 
or obscure until we can formulate our thought in 
precise analytical language. 

Claudel, in introducing larger motives in the con- 
ception of character, had to contend against many 
difficulties, the greatest of which was the French 
language. French does not lend itself to the ex- 
pression, I do not say of our complicated feelings 
— (far from it!) — but of those imponderable 
forces, such as the nature of a landscape, or the 
atmosphere of a house, or the spirit of a salon, or 
the action of God, which play such an important 
part in our existence. And in the great stride M. 
Claudel takes beyond his contemporaries, his seven- 
league boots abandon him sometimes at the right 
moment. 

It is very interesting for this reason to observe 
the success met with in England by L'Annonce Faite 



174 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

a Marie, that play overflowing with the supernatural. 
It is clear that the English public discovered therein 
that spiritual life so carefully fostered by Anglican- 
ism and by Quakerism. 

It is still more interesting to see how Claudel 
has reconciled within himself two contradictory 
tendencies : the lyrical and the dramatic force, which, 
though they contest each other like two lawyers 
pleading against one another, finally come to an 
understanding. In this way one may say that his 
literary work is divided into two parts: the work 
of his youth, Tete d'Or, la Ville, and la Jeune Fille 
Violaine, and the work of his maturity, which is far 
from being finished (and no one knows what sur- 
prises it has in store for us), with L'Otage (1911), 
UAnnonce Faite a Marie (1912), Le Pain Dur 
(1918). One may look upon L'E change (1894) and 
Le Part age de Midi (1906) as intermediary between 
the two manners. 

When young, Claudel is frankly a symbolist. He 
has the intuition of universal life: that is to say, 
the intuition of the depth, the totality even, of the 
reality he intends to express by every means in his 
power. * ^ Connaitre, ' ' he says, * ^ c'est constituer cela 
sans quoi le reste ne saurait etre.'' He will know, 
then, both the veil of the appearances of Maia and 
also what is hidden behind the Zaimph. If we take 
Tete d'Or, we are struck by the fact that the author 
would at all costs disconnect his drama with any 
particular country. The characters have strange, 
archaic, ancient or symbolic names : at one moment 
they speak the language of the Bible, and the next 
that of the Parisian Voyou. This mixture of exotism 
and antiquity, modernism and hellenism, is deliber- 
ate on the part of the author, who, not content with 
reading his ^schylus and translating the Agamem- 



PAUL CLATJDEL 175 

non, has read his Shakespeare over and over again, 
perhaps also Webster, and probably the sturdy- 
Spanish drama of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth 
Centuries. Once the first movement of surprise 
overcome — and the reader accustomed to the Eliza- 
bethan theatre easily enters the Claudelian stage, — 
the Anglo-Saxon reader readily understands that 
Simon Agnel and Cebes, the two characters in Tete 
d'Or, are the two sides of Claudel, or in fact of 
every human being inclining now towards good and 
now towards evil, mth a general direction quite 
as much towards Hell as towards Heaven. The 
same reader, too, is not displeased at being brought 
up against certain mysterious passages which may 
be interpreted in different ways. For example, why 
does Simon Agnel bury a woman? (unless that 
woman represents all his past), why does he sniear 
Cebes' hair with blood? (is it an allusion to certain 
ancient customs?). Finally, why is the princess 
changed into a thing of dread? 

This brutal strangeness, this epic savageness, in 
Claudel is the proof of a genius which cannot con- 
tain itself, but which suddenly overflows in waves 
so rapid that the stream arrives in jerks, and fright- 
ens us. Admirers of the Cinq Grandes Odes, as well 
as of the Art Poetique, know that Claudel, while 
seeking to give a character of eternity to his con- 
ception, wishing to embrace the whole universe, ac- 
cumulates image, metaphor, and picture, uniting the 
four corners of the world in a few lines. He is a 
veritable Rubens in poetry. Clearly such ardor 
carried on to the stage can only produce \dolent 
complicated dramas in the style of Tete d'Or and 
la Ville, plays calculated to exasperate devoted read- 
ers of the classic theatre. (Still, great as he is, 
Racine is not all humanity.) On reading Claudel 



176 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

one realizes that Ms sensual spirit, harassed and 
racked as it was by religious and metaphysical 
preoccupations, could but create hybrid characters : 
haK-living beings and half-moral or philosophical 
personifications. Once again we are forced to re- 
member Bunyan, and we realize how right Sainte- 
Beuve was in declaring there were families of minds. 

M. Louis Richard-Mounet, in his pamphlet on 
Claudel, has declared that ClaudePs work, though 
mystic in intention, is pagan in fact. We must 
be clear about the meaning of words. Claudel is no 
more a pagan than Bergson is a pantheist. The 
pagans, however intoxicated they may be with the 
beauties of the world, and the music of the heavenly 
spheres, have never conceived the universe other 
than as a block — universe. They have even imposed 
this conception upon us, teaching us at the same time 
a kind of voluptuous naturalism, or a selfish, arro- 
gant stoicism. Claudel knows this better than any- 
one. But as he loves the wonderful force of the 
first of the great Greek tragedians, and the divine 
simplicity of the second, he endeavors to transport 
on to the French stage the vigor and simplicity 
of ancient drama, its epic value. And at once the 
question arises, How can a Baudelairean, or at least 
a reader of Rimbaud and Mallarme, free himself 
from the yoke of these writers who are unbalanced 
by the modern antinomy between the faith of their 
country and their conception of Art? 

If we study VE change and le Partage de Midi 
(leaving on one side Le Repos du Septieme Jour), 
we become spectators of a conflict of passions ex- 
pressed with such living lyricism that we are heart- 
wrung. Le Partage de Midi is so much a part 
of his innermost fibres that, as journalists tells us, 
M. Claudel has given orders for its destruction. It 



PAUL CLAUDEL 177 

has been said of Yse, the heroine of this play, that her 
character consists in having none, that she merely 
displays * 4 'impulsivite morbide d^une detraquee.'' 
But life itself gives the answer for M. Claudel. And 
if we consult modern literature we find that the 
brothers de Goncourt, whose passion for documen- 
tation was intense, studied and described the same 
type of woman. Claudel is much truer than the 
de Goncourts; he makes his woman fall, but brings 
in the haunting sense of sin and of the presence 
of God. 

Pascal, one of Claudel 's masters, wrote: *^A11 that 
is in the world is the lust of the flesh, or the lust 
of the eyes, or the pride of life. Wretched is the 
cursed land which these three rivers of fire inflame 
rather than water.'' Claudel is profoundly con- 
vinced of the truth of that. He knows that such 
is his malady and the malady of his age, but how 
can it be cured? 

Byron goes to die in Greece, Musset wears him- 
self out by passion, Baudelaire tortures himself with 
a thousand rare sensations and with Gautier pur- 
sues the infinite in his worship of Beauty. Sainte- 
Beuve finds consolation in dissecting his own heart 
and that of his contemporaries. After such prede- 
cessors Claudel himself tells us his own great 
ambition : 

**Moi qui aimais tant les choses visibles, oh I 
j'aurais voulu voir tout, posseder avec appropria- 
tion, non avec les yeux seulement, ou les sens, mais 
avec Pintelligence de Pesprit, Et tout connaitre pour 
etre tout connu/' 

Thus we have the explanation of the profound 
thought underlying ClaudePs two greatest dramas, 
L'Otage and L'Annonce faite a Marie — the spirit 
of sacrifice: Tout connaitre pour etre tout connu: the 



178 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

last stage of Rene's malady! UAnnonce faite a 
Marie and, above all, L'Otage are dramas not of a 
Christian, but of a frenzied Christian who deliber- 
ately looks for difficulties in the pursuit of self- 
improvement. 

There is a kind of valetudinarian so-called health- 
fulness which is more sickly than sickness itself. 
True Catholicism is not M. ClaudePs Catholicism. 
True health does not consist in exerting yourself 
and fagging. With all his love of life and sharp- 
ness of insight, Claudel (I am speaking of his 
dramas) lacks this geniality of our big, burly world 
heroes. 

The spirit of sacrifice, the eagle that he is pur- 
suing, will turn one day and tear his very entrails.* 

ClaudePs art, like Bergson's, is in a sense founded 
upon metaphor: * 4 'operation qui resulte de la seule 
existence conjoint e et simultanee de deux choses 
differentes. ' 't He is the hunter of images, the 
dragoman of the earth, since all is symbol and every 
metaphor pregnant with the universe. The magic 
silence of a summer night when the moon rises and 
*^de temps en temps une pomme de Parbre choit 
comme une pensee lourde et mure ' ' ; splendid morn- 
ings of dazzling sunshine dancing on the sea; long 
lonely roads where friend rarely meets friend ; moral 
crises as tempestuous as the equinoctial gales; the 
joy of worship; the lyricism of inspiration — all 
these things evoke intuitions which in their turn 
show us that life is made up of feelings which are 
interpenetrated with something like the musical reso- 

*0n Claudel's dramas consult two penetrating articles by P. 
Lasserre in La Mmerve Frangaise (1st and 15th August, 1919). We 
are glad to agree with the eminent French critic. 

t"The operation that results from the simple existence, conjoined 
and eimultaneous, of two different things." 



PAUL CLAUDEL 179 

lutions of Browning's Galuppi Baldassaro. The 
whole universe is there crowding up against the door 
of our consciousness, and it is the poet's part to 
mingle the most imaginary things with the most 
real (just as Goethe did with his Werther — who is 
merely Goethe minus the suicide) ; to abandon him- 
self, that is, to his fancy, taking care, however, to 
bind the particular to the universal by the magic 
of his art. 

There is a passage in La Connaissance de VEst 
which must be studied carefully in order to under- 
stand ClaudePs aesthetic theory. I mean the pas- 
sage in which he compares European with Japanese 
art and decides in favor of the latter: 

"L'artiste europ^en copie la nature selon le sentiment qu'il en a: 
le Japonais Vimite selon les moyens qu'il lui emprunte; Tun s'ex- 
prime et I'autre I'exprime; I'un ouvrage, I'autre mime: Tun peint, 
I'autre compose; I'un est un etudiant, I'autre, dans un sens, un 
maltre; I'un reproduit dans son detail le spectacle qu'il envisage 
d'un oeil probe et subtil, I'autre degage d'un clignement de I'oeil la 
loi, et dans la liberte de sa fantaisie, I'applique avec une concision 
Bcripturale."* 

There is nothing surprising in such an attitude, 
for we of the present day are tired of pure virtu- 
osity and of that dexterity which the artist uses 
only in order to display his own temperament. 
Claudel is merely expressing in his turn the feel- 
ing of revolt against thej^rench Academic School, 
the feeling which in the great independent painters 
of the latter Nineteenth Century produced so many 
original masterpieces. 

*"The European artist copies Nature according to the feeling 
which he has of it; the Japanese imitates it according to the means 
he borrows therefrom; the- one expresses himself, the other nature; 
the one works, the other mimics; the one paints, the other composes; 
the one is a student, the other, in a sense, a master; the one repro- 
duces in all its detail the spectacle envisaged by"'aii astute and subtle 
eye, the other, in a flash of insight, extracts from it its very law, 
and in the freedom of his fantasy applies it with a rigorous preci- 
sion." > 



180 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

There are moments when Claudel feels so tired 
of Reason that he will only employ her as the 
humblest of his servants. That is the explanation of 
the passage in la Connaissance de VEst, which 
clearly shows ClaudePs attitude towards earthly 
things: *^Aux heures vulgaires nous nous servons 
des choses pour un usage, oubliant ceci de pur, 
qu'elles soient; mais quand, apres un long travail, 
au travers des branches et des ronces, a midi, pene- 
trant historiquement au sein de la clairiere, je pose 
ma main sur la croupe brulante du lourd rocher, 
Pentree d 'Alexandre a Jerusalem est comparable a 
Penormite de ma constatation.''* 

What does he mean exactly by '^Venormite de ma 
constatation' ' f The same thing, I think, that Scho- 
penhauer meant in the following passage: *^If, 
raised by the power of the mind, a man relinquishes 
the common way of looking at things ... ; if he 
thus ceases to consider the where, the when, the 
why and the whither of things and looks simply and 
solely at the what; if, further, he does not allow 
abstract thought, the concepts of the reason, to take 
possession of his consciousness, but, instead of all 
this, gives the whole power of his mind to percep- 
tion; ... if thus the object has to such an extent 
passed out of all relation to something outside it 
and the subject out of all relation to the will, then 
that which is so known is no longer the particular 
thing as such, but it is the Idea, the eternal form; 
. . . and, therefore, he who is sunk in this perception 
is no longer individual, for in such perception the 
individual has lost himself ; but he is pure, will-less, 
painless, timeless subject of knowledge.' '•\ 

This idealism necessarily led him to the concep- 

*La Cormaissance de VEst, page 164. 

iThe World as Will and Idea. Vol. I, page 231. Translated by 
R. D. Haldane ajid T. Kemp. London: Triibner & Co. 



PAUL CLAUDEL 181 

tion of Time, which is the foundation of Bergsonian 
philosophy. Five little words in Claudel, 'Theure 
Sonne et je retentis/' explain better than any long- 
winded commentary what he means by saying that 
*^Le temps est le sens [direction] de la vie/* 
*^L'heure sonne et je retentis'* is only another way 
of saying: What I know, I possess. I enjoy the 
wonderful vision of the sea, but * * alors que cette eau 
deviendra noire, je possederai la nuit toute entiere 
avec le nombre integral des etoiles visibles et invisi- 
bles. ' ' (La Connaissance de I 'Est, p. 100. ) ' ' L 'heure 
Sonne et je retentis'' : that is to say, *^ there is a pure 
and uniform time, that which is written on our 
clocks. . . . There is also a real qualitative time, 
which is the progress of living beings and the con- 
tinual modification of their relations ; it is the artisan 
of something real, which increases with every sec- 
ond.'' — '^L'heure sonne et je retentis/' Our mind 
clings to the belief that there exists somewhere a 
r^ady-made plan, a mechanism with pulleys, weights 
and pendulum: a kind of grandfather's clock sur- 
mounted by God the Father, with a flowing beard. 
But the universe is always in the making. **Tout 
mouvement est d'un point . . . et non vers un 
point. L'origine du mouvement est dans ce fre- 
missement qui saisit la matiere en contact d'une 
realite diiferente: 1 'esprit" (pp. 33-34, La Connais- 
sance de VEst), '^L'heure sonne et je retentis/' be- 
cause **man is a vibration, his spirit is movement." 
So that we do not seek to understand ^ * the' mechan- 
ism of things from below, like an engine-driver crawl- 
ing underneath his engine," but we stand *^ before 
the sum total of creatures like a critic before a poet 's 
work, fully appreciating the thing, trying to see how 
the effects were produced, like a painter half clos- 
ing his eyes to look at the work of another painter, 



182 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

like an engineer watching the working of a beaver." 
^'Uheure sonne et je retentis/' In other words, 
the world must appear to us in all its spontaneity. 
Causes and laws are useful when we want to look 
up something in Nature's Dictionary. It is for us 
to create the present, clothe it in our own originality. 

"Me voici, 
Imbecile, ignorant, 

Homme nouveau devant les choses inconnues, 

Et je tourne ma face vers I'annee et I'arche pluvieuse, j'ai plain 
mon coeur d'ennui."* 

This philosophy is a part of the intuitive psychol- 
ogy which makes Claudel hear only the grander 
sentiments of the human heart and show us those 
profound states of consciousness which are pure 
quality. As his Fee Lala says : — 

"Nul ne connait le secret de ma joie, ni eux, ni les autres, ni vous- 

meme. 
Coeuvre lui-meme, bien qu'il eoit le seul 
Homme qui ait eu de moi possession 
(Et tu es le fruit de notre union, 6 roi) 
Ne m'a point counue tout entiere. 
Car son esprit s'attache aux causes et il 
Les rassemble dans la profonde cavite de son esprit. . . . 
Mais le d^lice et ce saisissement 
Q'il y k sentir qu'on ne tient plus k rien est ce qu'il ne connait pas 

encore. 
Le vol fixe de la pensee qui comme un nageur soulev6 par le courant 
Le maintient dans la vibration de la lumiere, 
Ces coups soudains, ces essors insaisissables, ces departs, 
Sont encore ce que tu sais mal, 6 pontife."t 

Here Claudel is expressing the feelings of a Saint 
Francis of Assisi when he took Poverty as his bride, 
or of any mystic, freed from corporal chains, as he 
reaches his seventh heaven. 

In the same way this philosophy is once more an 
Art of Poetry which is Mallarme's. Both men 
try to recreate the poet^s emotive state with words, 

*Tete d'Or— 
\La Ville, page 307. 



PAUL CLAUDEL 183 

and as many images as possible (ClaudePs vocabu- 
lary is enormous — German critics, please note!), 
and above all with alliteration, strangeness of syn- 
tax, ambiguity of meaning {le temps est le sens de 
la vie), and with a rhythmic prose cut up into small 
paragraphs. Claudel wants to make us realize in 
all its fullness the intuition of emotion which has 
suddenly illuminated things for him. He knows 
that a word has the power of evoking numberless 
images, and he is not afraid of having recourse to 
the musical device of long pauses. 

Music alone can render the privileged soul of 
the poet and the state of our more vulgar souls. 
Nevertheless, we must be grateful to Paul Claudel 
for having tried by means of every ingenuity of syn- 
tax, trick of rhythm and shade of language, to ex- 
press the inexpressible. 

"O Amie, je ne suis pas un dieu! 
Et mon ame, je ne peux te la partager, et tu ne peux me prendre 
et me eontenir et me posseder." 

{Deuxi^me Ode.) 

Side by side with Claudel there is a phalanx of 
Catholic writers and poets, of whom the most fa- 
mous are Francis Jammes and Adrien Mithouard. 
M. Adrien Mithouard is now, I believe. President 
of the Paris Municipal Council. He has written 
some truly wonderful meditations, of which Le 
Pauvre Pecheur is the masterpiece, and a Traite 
de V Occident based, like ClaudePs, on Bergson's 
idea of time. The dates rule out any question of 
imitation and the resemblance is the more striking. 
**L^heure Sonne et je retentis^' — so Claudel: and 
Mithouard: **Ce n'est pas la quantite qui cree le 
rythme, mais les coups que nous frappons.^' Not 
only does M. Mithouard, who is a distinguished 
musician, write on the study of music the very 



184 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

original pages noted by M. Tancrede de Visan in his 
Attitude du Lyrisme Contemporain, but he sees 
clearly — like Claudel once more — that this idea 
of Time is the same as our love of continuity and 
tradition. *^C'est notre point d'honneur de per- 
sister tenaces, et tandis que nous doutons sans cesse 
si nous sommes bien aujourd'hui le meme qui posa 
tel acte autrefois, c'est avec une ivresse infinie que 
nous retrouvons tout a coup dans Pautrefois ce 
quelqu'un qui est indubitablement nous-memes. ' ' 

In a charming book, called French Perspectives, 
Miss Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant has shown this 
same admirable trait of the French race simply by 
recording conversations with French ouvrieres a 
domicile. 

** France is the country of unity,*' cries M. 
Mithouard: yes, but she is also the country of 
order and moderation, and her social preoccupations 
will never upset the working of her desire for order. 

Francis Jammes, who stands in the front rank 
of modern poets, was long content with being the 
Theocritus of his native Beam, and with proving 
once again that in order to give new life to old 
themes it is sufficient to be endowed with poetic 
genius. ^^J'ai fait des vers faux et j'ai laisse de 
cote, ou a peu pres, toute forme et toute metrique. 
. . . Mon style balbutie, mais j'ai dit ma verite*' 
(Preface to his Poems). 

The name of Theocritus comes naturally to mind 
when we read Jammes 's ingenuous idyls laid round 
Orthez with their recurring note of such lines as : — 

"Lea chevrier trainards gonflant leurs joues aux flutes." 

But he is often much more like the great Irish 
poet, A. E., and is even more than he in close com- 
munion with the beasts and lowly beings of the 



PAUL CLAUDEL 185 

earth. Yet, whilst A. E. turned towards Buddhism, 
Jammes never has recourse to the wonders of India. 
For him the humblest life is full of mystery, and 
the meanest of living creatures, by the very fact 
that it is constantly in God^s mind, is a perpetual 
source of beauty. Maeterlinck spoke to us of the 
tragique quotidien, and the words are well fitted to 
his conception of destiny. For Jammes there is a 
naturel quotidien, and it is all-sufficient. **Toutes 
choses sont bonnes a decrire, lorsqu^elles sont natu- 
relles, ' ^ he declares in his literary manifesto. But : 
**Les choses naturelles ne sont pas seulement le 
pain, la viande, Peau, le sel, les arbres et les mou- 
tons, Phomme et la femme et la gaiete ... ; il y 
a aussi parmi elles des cygnes, des lis, des couronnes 
et la tristesse.'^ And it is probably on account of 
that tristesse that he turned towards religion. 

M. Charles le Goffic, who was a graceful poet in 
the classic tradition before he became one of the 
historians of the war, pointed out in the Revue 
Hehdomadaire* that Jammes was far from being 
isolated in his attitude, reinforced as he was by such 
men as Charles Guerin, Amedee Prouvost, Jean 
Lionnet, Arsene Vermenouze, Adrien Mithouard and 
Adolphe Rette. M. le Goffic shows in the same article 
how things have changed since the day when Ver- 
laine's Catholicism was accounted to him for 
eccentricity, since neither Sully-Prudhomme, nor 
Catulle Mendes, nor Francois Coppee, nor Jose 
Maria de Heredia, nor Leon Dieux, nor Mallarme, 
manifested any great affection for the Church. But 
the young writers, the men like Mauriac, Vallery 
Radot, Andre Delacour, Andre Lafon, Maurice Bril- 
lant, Louis Perroy, Charles Orsatti, are profoundly 
religious poets. 

*See Revue Hehdomadaire, 3 juin 1911. 



JULES ROMAINS 

JULES EOMAINS is the leader of the Unmi- 
miste School. He is also a direct disciple of 
Claudel, and, although he differs essentially 
from his master from the religious point of view, 
it is clear that if Claudel had never written, Eomains 
would be other than he is. Jules Remains himself 
makes no mystery about this influence. ^^De qui 
nous reclamons-nous f he says. ^'De nous-memes 
d'abord et de la vie presente. Mais nous saluons 
des precurseurs : Wliitman, Zola, Verhaeren, le Hugo 
de quelques poemes, le Baudelaire des Tableaux 
parisieyis et des Poemes en Prose. Rimbaud et Paul 
Claudel ont pressenti la vertu de Pexpression imme- 
diate, Bergson en a donne la justification meta- 
physique.''* 

That is well said, and reminds us of the fact that 
Jules Remains is a professor of Philosophy. The 
study of his work only leads us further afield in 
the question of the influence of Bergson. 

Two tendencies of Bergsonian philosophy ap- 
pealed especially to Jules Remains: the theory of 
Intuition considered from a certain point of view, 
and the theory of the interaction and co-penetration 
of all beings. 

M. Weber, in an article in the Revue de la M eta- 
physique et de la Morale (and M. Jules Remains 

*Emile Henriot: A quoi revent les jeunes gens? page 35. Paris, 
1913. 

186 



JULES ROMAINS 187 

seems to me to share Ms opinion), showed that 
M. Bergson's thesis on Time and Free-Will really 
leads to this : life has no other law than itself. At 
this date Bergson had not made his statements on 
the importance of ethical values, and consequently 
the reader was free, if he so willed, to construct 
from the philosopher's writings an anarchist doc- 
trine which delivered our instincts from all check 
or control. M. Jules Romains, no doubt, would take 
a certain amount of pleasure in proving to us, logi- 
cally and mathematically, since he is a professor 
of philosophy, that in reality the accomplished fact, 
compelling as it does our admiration, becomes 
thereby the basis of all ethics. In any case, the 
poet-novelist side of him realized that this theory, 
if cunningly mingled with others equally fashion- 
able, could be made to produce new literary effects. 

It is obvious, then, how different he is from Clau- 
del; in fact, it is only the latter 's literary process 
which he imitates. But at the same time he does 
not forget that our mind is not purely ours; it is 
the product of race, milieu, the human groups in 
which we live. Here clearly the influence of the 
philosophies of Tarde, Durkheim, Le Bon reinforce 
that of Bergson, so true it is that a period always 
produces a number of thinkers who, without know- 
ing one another, march in parallel lines towards the 
same goal. 

The master of whom he most often reminds me 
is Verhaeren, who never ceased singing the praises 
of will and power, who used to say: '^L'homme est 
un fragment de Parchitecture mondiale. II a la 
conscience et 1 'intelligence de Pensemble dont il fait 
partie. II se sent enveloppe et domine, et en meme 
temps il envelappe et domine." 

Verhaeren was the first to express the poetry of 



188 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

the age of macliiiiery and crowds, that poetry which 
the Vicomte Eugene Melchior de Vogue felt when 
he wrote of the Exhibition of 1889. All Verhaeren's 
work is devoted to the divinization of the * * tumultu- 
ous forces'' which make of men first a plaything, 
and then a '^multiple splendeur,'' to borrow from 
the titles of two of his books. The beauty of many 
of his poems is born of that anguish he feels in con- 
sidering the ^Hentacled towns'' which drag towards 
them the toilers on the land, and of the emotion 
he feels before a crowd, that unconscious worker 
for beauty and peace. Fervent idealist as he is, 
he bequeaths to his disciples a creed of enthusiasm 
and love such as neither Baudelaire nor Verlaine 
had to offer. 

This love of humanity is allied in Romains and 
the younger poets with a conception of poetry as 
far removed as could be from that which Malherbe 
and Boileau imposed upon French letters. Each 
self is an enormous and new power in nature. What, 
then, is self? Nothing, if you think of it as a brief 
accident in duration. Everything, if you think of 
it as bound up in a host of other selves. Thus 
Jules Romains was led to conceive a new religious 
emotion. This soul which is no longer circumscribed 
by a precarious self, but is lost in the great sea of 
humanity, feels a really holy sensation. Jules 
Romains is right in extolling man's altruistic side. 
A.n act of charity is really an angelic thing, and 
the good Samaritan experiences the same feeling 
as those great saints who, as William James puts 
it, **with their extravagance of human tenderness 
are the great torch-bearers" in the belief in the 
brotherhood of man. But Romaines is wrong when 
he wants to diminish our personalities, and when he 



JULES ROMAINS 189 

refuses to see tliat Will is ruler of the world. He 
cannot be unaware of the criminal instincts in the 
species man, nor of the importance of will and such 
factors as moral education which tend to suppress 
these instincts and make of us complete men. 

In any case, Jules Eomains realized that this idea 
of our self, if not new, had not hitherto received 
its full expression in literature. The subject of 
the highly original poems and novels which have 
compelled lovers of letters to study him is this 
human personality dwelling not in the understand- 
ing, but in a necessarily vague region, our subliminal 
self, and even in the masses around us. And in 
this way he appeals to a feeling which is older than 
man himself. He hymns the aggrandizement of 
human personality and consequently of all those 
tempestuous actions which bear our souls on into 
an unknown mysterious region. Once again we 
hear the Romantic cry: **Levez-vous vite, orages 
desires qui devez emporter Rene dans les espaces 
d^une autre vie!" 

So that this Unanimisme in Jules Remains is 
really the worship of the superman as he realizes 
himself in those nameless forces which everyone 
feels in an enthusiastic public meeting, or any great 
public demonstration. From this point of view his 
Prise de Paris, and in fact the whole of the volume 
called Sur les Quais de la Villette, is his masterpiece, 
and it realizes his dream of unanimisme at least in 
this, that all Frenchmen will be unanimous in prais- 
ing. His volume of poems, La Vie Unanime, is the 
exposition of this new mystery, and I fear that in 
it Jules Remains is the victim of his own system. 
An idea cannot be drawn out indefinitely like a piece 
of gutta percha. 



190 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

"L'espoir du paradis qui flambait autrefois. 
On eut beau le couvrir avec nos doigts, le vent a souffle la chandelle; 
Le vent a balaye I'eau-delk du zenith; 
Mais pour nous consoler de la vie eternelle 
Nous aurons la vie unanime."* 

The same idea runs through the novel which per- 
haps made his name, and of which there exists an 
admirable English translation, la Mort de quelqu'un. 
It describes the utter disappearance of a being who 
after death still exists in some small way in the 
minds of those who knew him, but finally vanishes 
entirely. Just before sinking into complete oblivion, 
he appears once again in the mind of someone who 
was present by chance at his funeral, but who no 
longer remembers so much as the name of the man 
who was buried. 

**Dead man, dead man,'' he said, **you see that 
I have not deserted you. True, you have no mouth 
with which to complain and protest; but an hour 
ago you had nothing at all. Am I not kind to youf 
Will you say that I could not have done otherwise! 
No, I consented; I made a choice, I picked you out 
to love you, and for reasons tainted with noth- 
ing of mortality. I never saw you in the body, I 
never loved your voice, your appearance, your way 
of looking at things, the mere precarious husk of 
your being. My desire was for your very essence," 
etc.f 

And it is all really horribly sad. There is a reli- 
gious feeling in our skeptic Jules Romains, a very 
characteristic mixture of philosophic faith and hu- 
man disillusionment. 

Les Copains, which is generally voted the epithet 
Rabelaisian, shows us very clearly the stuff of which 

*La Vie Unanime, page 226. 

\The Death of Nohody, translated by Desmond MacCarthy and 
Sydney Waterloo. 



JULES EOMAINS 191 

Jules Eomains's gaiety is made: no simplicity, 
little abandon, but a great deal which is voluntary 
and philosophically thought out. There is certainly 
nothing spontaneous about the gaiety of this dis- 
ciple of Bergson who sings the praises of spon- 
taneity ; his fun is strained, with a path well mapped 
out in front of it, a true victory won over the sad- 
ness of intellect which was about to give way un- 
der the burden of life's sorrows. When the leader 
of the Copains, at the close of the volume, looking 
back on all the practical jokes played on the sober- 
minded bourgeois, cries, **Vous avez instaure Pacte 
pur. Depuis la creation du monde. . . . il n 'y a pas 
eu d'acte pur. . . . Ce que les hommes ont de se- 
rieux et de sacre, vous en avez fait des objets de 
plaisir . . . vous avez, sans ombre de raison, en- 
chaine Pun a Pautre des actes gratuits. ... A la 
nature vous avez donne des lois et si provisoires I ' V 
one recognizes the metaphysician in search of 
amusement and the student who to get it laughs 
at himself, and even at his master. But then, whom 
are we to trust, the author of Les Copains or the 
poet of La Vie Unanimef Doubtless he realized 
that literature is after all a great game, and, be- 
cause of that, much will be forgiven him. But as 
we read over his poems we see that the man who 
wrote les Copains is the same man who formerly 
used to console himself by giving himself up to the 
influence of the crowd and of the external world; 
the man with a true child's heart amused by any 
trifle: 

Tout de m6me, si j'6tais 
En train de passer an paa 
Sur un pont dont j'ai m^moire 
Dans un noir quartier du Sud; 

Si je sentaia maintenant 

Trembler sous mon corps en marche 



192 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

Le trottoir du pont de fer 
Qu' ebranlent des camions; 

Une rumeur oublieuse 

Emporterait toute peine; 

Et je dormirais au bras 

D'un reve grand comme un dieu. 

And this brings us to the question, What, then, is 
poetry according to Romains and his friends? By 
his friends I mean those he attaches to his ideas, 
but who distinctly intend to remain original: 
Georges Chenneviere with Le Printemps; Pierre- 
Jean-Jouve with les Ordres qui changent and les 
Aeroplanes; Rene Arcos with Ce qui natt; Georges 
Duhamel with V Homme en tete and Luc Durtain 
with VEtape necessaire; and Charles Vildrac with 
his Livre d^ Amour. 

According to this group of interesting writers, 
poetry is a spontaneous revelation, like the light- 
ning tearing the clouds; it is the expression of all 
that is most secret, most mysterious — the poet's 
soul, the poet 's soul in its relations with beings and 
things. But every poet worthy of the name knows 
this truth, which surely needs no underlining. As for 
spontaneity, there are two kinds — children 's, which 
is amusing ; old poets \ which is profound : so that we 
are brought up against a kind of Irish bull — spon- 
taneity is real only when it is deliberate. In any 
case what explains the attitude of this new school 
of poetry is that of the old school of poetry which 
was little else than eloquence in Alexandrines, and 
which certainly never tried to sound those depths 
of consciousness upon which Bergson loves to dwell. 

The Anglo-Saxon reader, who has sufered under 
Racine, will sympathize with these young men (it 
was in England that Taine found his Racine criti- 
cism) ; therein is the enthronement of the concep- 
tion held by most — though not all — English poets. 



JULES EOMAINS 193 

Classical tragedy aims at offering a series of 
faithful portraits of the human soul together with 
a good deal of very subtle dialectics; its achieve- 
ment along those lines can never be destroyed. 
This idea of an eminently civilized art is the finest 
the human brain can conceive. Goethe came to it 
after his Romantic period and then wrote his mas- 
terpieces. The talented young poets we are now 
considering are refined, subtle barbarians cultivat- 
ing for choice an essentially savage art. But then 
they are confronted with the supreme difficulty: 
when they are seized with a really intuitive inspira- 
tion one of two things must happen. Either their 
poem will be a song without words — in which case 
they must take refuge in music — or they will have 
recourse to words, and the resulting poem will be 
very like the poetry of — yes, Wordsworth ; that is, 
of the most astonishingly prosaic of great poets.* 

Charles Vildrac's little masterpiece, Livre 
d' Amour, is in a certain sense the demonstration 
of what I am trying to prove. The themes are 
Wordsworthian : two men drinking in an inn; an 
inn symbolical of woman's need of love; the descrip- 
tion of nocturnal scenes {Eire un Jiomme), a poor 
woman pushing a squeaky perambulator along the 
road, a sickly ill-clad landscape, the visit of a friend 
to his friends in spite of a snowstorm, a man drown- 
ing in the sea. . . . The great difference between 
the two poets is that the Lakist loses himself in 
Nature, while Vildrac dreams of a vast kingdom 
of brotherhood — as Wordsworth indeed did in his 
youth. 

This humanitarian note is the great thing to re- 
member about this French movement, and it is a 

*Cf. The Chapter, "New Voices in French Poetry," in French 
Perspectives^ E. S. Sergeant. 



194 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

consoling note. In place of the sadness and melan- 
choly of Romanticism, we find a love of life and 
love of man uplifting these young writers, and in- 
spiring them with really human work which is as 
fine as that of their predecessors. These poets 
have come down from the ^4vory tower** of 
thought, and, instead of passing in front of life 
without seeing it, they throw themselves into the 
thick of it. In this way, however different a man 
like Francis Jammes may seem from a man like 
Claudel, they are alike not only in their fluency, in 
the music of their poetry, not only in their search 
for simplicity, but in their love of humanity. 



JEAN MOEEAS 

ALL the activities of intellectual life which form, 
as it were, the common atmosphere of an 
epoch, may start from different points, but 
they run on parallel lines and encourage one another, 
like groups of school-boys running through a play- 
ing field, each group bent on its own particular game, 
but catching zest and enthusiasm from the others. 
The man of letters, when he reaches a certain stage 
in philosophical research, cannot help discovering 
the eternal types of action and passion, and is more- 
over forced to ask himself what is their raison 
d'etre: are the categories by which the intellect per- 
ceives phenomena, manifestations of a superior 
reality; and after all is not the artist's invention, 
which he himself believes to be conscious, rather the 
surrender of his being to the suggestions of some 
superior principle, be it called intuition, or abstract 
reason? 

It may seem a far cry from the works of M. Berg- 
son or of M. Eavaisson to the poems of Jean Moreas, 
and yet when we understand Eavaisson 's or Berg- 
son's philosophy as well as Moreas' stanzas we 
realize that at bottom we are dealing with the same 
hellenic, generous philosophy, the same striving to 
be independent of mere intellect, the same aspiring 
towards all the conditions of a musical art. 

By Hellenism I do not mean that hellenism which 
is only a canon, a system of rules which the Greeks 
are supposed to have imposed upon their artists 

195 



196 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WRITERS 

and all those thereby inspired, a somewhat passion- 
less range of effects which looks like a cold sensu- 
alism without any inner ideals. On the contrary, 
the great Greek philosophers and artists were the 
first to see that a work of art is a living organism, 
and genius an essence apart, anticipating, and even 
creating, facts. The Bergsonian conception of re- 
ality brings us nearer this hellenism so well under- 
stood by Renaissance and Nineteenth- Century 
humanists. Human thought, thus spiritualized and 
refined by ages of aspiration and suffering, seeks 
now only this unity, this solidarity of beings, which 
the great philosophers of antiquity also sought. 
The artist who seeks to limit himself to the concrete 
— truly Greek therein — submits to what Bergson 
calls the Immediate. For the desire to reproduce 
the expression and individual character of every 
being and every thing, to write as it were the pri- 
vate history of every soul, is to be essentially both 
ancient and modern in character. 

Fromentin called the Nineteenth-Century school 
of painting the * * sensation school. ' ' The name could 
be applied to the more famous works of Nineteenth- 
Century literature ; Bergson or Moreas are the last 
comers among the impersonations of their age: all 
that w^as intense and original in it is crystallized 
in them. The pedant will probably deny them the 
title of pure hellenists, but they are both Renaissance 
men, actuated by the same desire as the great men 
of the Sixteenth Century to translate the movement 
of life which is carried on in shaping itself, of the 
eternal becoming which is ever new. 

The symbolism of the French poets aims at ex- 
pressing these efforts of the writer who tries, by 
means of a perfect identification of form and matter, 
to arrive not only at a reproduction of reality, but 



JEAN MOREAS 197 

to suggest something behind it, more distant, more 
divine if possible. A perusal of Baudelaire's VArt 
Romantique will surely open the most prejudiced 
eyes to this point of view. In order to give real 
expression to what was in their hearts, and yet to 
remain always hostile to all declamation and false 
sentiment, the great Renaissance artists, and those 
of our day, have recourse to a kind of incomplete 
effect, something not quite finished which we see in 
their sculptures and poems, something of that reluc- 
tance to arrive at conclusions which Flaubert con- 
sidered was an attribute of God. It is this infinite 
suggestiveness that holds us in the statues of 
Michelangelo and of Rodin, in the poems of Joachim 
du Bellay or of Moreas. 

But the art which, far more than sculpture, paint- 
ing or literature, is a matter of pure perception is 
the art of music. ^^De la musique avant toute 
chose,'' cried Verlaine, echoing the dearest wish of 
his age. We know what help music has lent to 
Bergson's theories; on the other hand, after study- 
ing les Syrtes (1884), les CantiUnes (1886), le Pe- 
lerin Passionne (1891), Eriphyle (1894) and his 
Stances (1899 and 1901), we realize that in spite 
of his avatars, which we will presently consider, 
Moreas was always an intuitif whose expression, 
though very clear (for he has a holy horror of the 
theatrical), was laden with the multiple meaning of 
the most general feelings of the human mind. His 
art might be defined by saying that his aim was 
to sum up the most original or quintessential sen- 
sations of life in phrases often archaic in form, but 
which were always original, but, and before all, 
musical. 

Anatole France, welcoming the Pelerin passionne 
in 1892, certainly hits off the poet's real attitude of 



198 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

mind when lie says that Moreas would be acquainted 
with the Gods of ancient Greece only under the more 
slender form they wore on the banks of the Seine or 
the Loire, in the golden days of the Pleiade. M. 
France goes on to say that Moreas' real country 
is the north of France, with its blue slates and light 
gray skies, and which possesses those jewels of 
architecture decorated by the Renaissance with sym- 
bolic figure and subtle design. 

The first number of the Mercure de France ap- 
peared in January, 1890, and the whole history of 
symbolism may be said without exaggeration to be 
closely connected with the history of this Review. 
The future historian of this great literary move- 
ment will be forced to go very carefully through 
every number of the Mercure. 

The ruling sesthetician of the school was incontest- 
ably Remy de Gourmont. Leaving on one side that 
part of his philosophy which only developed later — 
I mean his determinism which led him to declare, 
^^L 'esprit humain est si complexe et les choses sont 
si enchevetrees les unes dans les autres que pour 
expliquer un brin de paille, il f audrait demonter tout 
Punivers'' — it is clear that he devoted himself 
entirely to the exposition of that subjective or tran- 
scendental idealism according to which there is no 
reality save that which we imagine. The world is 
a representation made by our senses, and matter has 
no reality independently of the mind which perceives 
it. It was from Villiers de I'Isle Adam that Remy 
de Gourmont learnt this principle, and he amused 
himself by looking for it in the works he studied 
with all the keenness of a collector. 

Villiers de PIsle Adam had taken his philosophy 
from the early Nineteenth- Century German philo- 
sophic school. It is interesting to see how careful 



JEAN MOREAS 199 

young innovators are to provide themselves with 
predecessors, with ancestors for their support. Eon- 
sard and the Pleiade chose the ancients; the Sym- 
bolists turned to the conquerors of 1870 who boasted 
that they were the leaders of the modern world and 
inventors of the very last word in culture ! 

Once again we see verified that law of which 
Tarde speaks in his book, les Lois de VImitation: 
progress is made by a man who invents and by 
others who imitate; only we must sometimes sub- 
stitute the word nation for the word man. It would 
be easy to study and verify this law in its applica- 
tion to literature: here, in the case we are consid- 
ering. Symbolism was the conversion of a large 
number of young minds to German mysticism; it 
is, as it were, the culminating point of that slow, 
sly operation of German penetration which was be- 
ing accomplished throughout the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury. For close on a hundred years the French 
have been undergoing a philosophical and literary 
Germanization. Madame de Stael began the work 
which Wagner, Karl Marx, and Strauss were to 
finish. 

The reaction was bound to come, and it came with 
a poet who had read Goethe, Winckelmann and 
Schopenhauer. Moreas was the poet with whom 
Frenchmen had most in common before 1914. This 
is easily seen by reading the studies made of him 
by two such different, not to say hostile, writers 
as Charles Maurras and Rene Gillouin. 

In the first place, Moreas was of foreign extrac- 
tion, like several other famous contemporary poets. 
His real name was the rather cumbersome one of 
Papadiamantopoulos, and he was born at Athens 
on April 15th, 1856. It is noteworthy that in the 
course of the last thirty years great French poets 



200 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

have been born under other skies than those of the 
Seine, or Loire, or Ehone. Moreas was a Greek, 
Verhaeren a Fleming, Francis Stuart-Merrill and 
Viele-Griffin are, or were, American, Snares is said 
to be Portuguese, and Gustave Kahn of foreign de- 
scent, Maeterlinck, Mockel and Van Lerberghe are 
Belgian, Maria Krisinska was a Pole, Madame de 
Noailles is a descendant on the paternal side of the 
Wallachian Bibesco family, and her mother is of 
Greek extraction. Many other examples will read- 
ily occur to the reader. There is something exciting 
about reading these poets who have preferred 
France to the land of their birth, for they make 
us spectators of a dramatic contest. Which will 
win with them — the Latin genius of which France 
is the finest expression, or the genius of their own 
land? Will French education, the influence of 
salons and French society, in a word, will Paris melt 
in her crucible all the precious metals these travel- 
lers bring her, and will she be able to make from 
them a wondrous new alloy? 

There is no doubt about the answer with Moreas 
— and little with the others. **La contemplation 
de la Seine,'' says Moreas, *^et la lecture repetee du 
24me chant de I'lliade enseignent le mieux ce que 
c'est que le sublime: je veux dire la mesure dans 
la force. . . . L 'ombre de Pallas erre dans sa ville 
bien aimee, Athenes pent se contenter de 1 'ombre de 
la deesse. Mais la W.e de Zeus habite reellement 
Paris. ' ' 

After a certain amount of Eonsardizing and Sym- 
bolizing, Moreas in his later years was purely and 
simply a classic poet. The reader remembers per- 
haps his words to Maurice Barres on his deathbed: 
^^ There is no such thing as Classic and Eomantic, 
that's all nonsense ... if only I felt better I could 



JEAN MOREAS 201 

explain what I mean. ' ' We shall never know what 
arguments Moreas would have used : but we do know 
that after writing what seemed to many French- 
men a somewhat tortured poetry, he finally pro- 
duced the noblest and most classic. And in this he 
is symbolic of the evolution of the young school of 
1890-1914. He is a representative man. 

If we leave poetry for a moment and consider 
the novels of the younger men of the present day 
(I mean the men of about forty-five), we see a very 
curious thing. The influence of Jules Lemaitre, 
Anatole France, or Maurice Barres, or even Henri 
de Regnier, has served only to interest novelists 
in the eternal passions of the human heart, in man 
as the Seventeenth- Century writers saw him; and 
they pose him as a rule in a setting of centenarian 
trees. The younger writers, with some rare excep- 
tions, are careful to compose in the classic manner, 
transfiguring reality into conformity with the de- 
sires of their hearts which are weary from much 
wandering. (Long past are the days of Dumas 
pere and Victor Hugo and of Eugene Sue !) These 
young-old writers know that they do not invent ex- 
istence ; they receive it with a sad and contrite heart. 
They do not choose for subjects the physical abnor- 
malities studied by Zola and his school. They love 
to study provincial life, but only in order that they 
may paint its old-world, humdrum, traditional side. 

We have only to think of such men as Rene Bois- 
lere, or Henry Bordeaux, Charles de Pomairols, Al- 
phonse de Chateaubriant, Andre Beaunier, and their 
numerous talented disciples. Charles Geniaux de- 
serves a place to himself: his masterpiece, Armelle 
Louannais, — which has been ^' couronnee'' by the 
French Academy, — a study of the Breton soul at 
the time of Lamennais, is a powerful work of lyrical 



202 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

realism with a picturesque style that evokes in us 
long, long thoughts. How different these writers 
are from Balzac! Their characters reck little of 
the struggle to make money — their creators attune 
them with infinite skill to the landscape which is 
their background, so that the pleasant land of old 
France, so dear to the romantic English heart, is 
reflected in themselves. 

Of course it must not be forgotten that, on the 
other hand, free rein is given to temperament, and 
even Bergson's name claimed as authority for lit- 
erary anarchy: — 

La raison, la raison ce n'est pas I'univers. . . . 
Je ne veux pas lancer devant moi des mirages, 
Creer des fruits abstraits dans un grand verger froid.* 

cried a young poet who died before he had time 
to fulfil his promise. But, on the whole. Reason and 
old French tradition put up a gallant defense and 
brought such novelists as Louis Bertrand, Pierre 
Lasserre, Henry Bidou, or the brothers Tharaud, 
to that kind of asceticism which creates all things 
sub specie aeternitatis. Doubtless these novelists 
have read Constant's Adolphe, Fromentin's Domi- 
nique, and Feydan's Fanny, but they have grown 
tired of analysis, sick of hair-splitting. 

Any serious study of Moreas leads us to exactly 
the same conclusion. Take an example from his 
famous book, les Stances. The poet has loved and 
has seen his love betrayed — he has suffered. See 
now how he has transfigured his sorrow, content- 
ing himself with this invocation to Nature: — 

Ah! fuyez k present, malheureuses pensees, 

colore, 6 remords. 
Souvenirs qui m'avez les deux tempes pressees 

De I'etreinte des morts! 



*Henri Franck, La Danse devant I'Arche. 



JEAN MOREAS 203 

Sentiers de mousses pleins, vaporeuses fontaines, 

Grottes profondes, voix 
Des oiseaux et du vent, lumieres incertaines 

Des sauvages sous-bois; 
Insectes, animaux, larvea, beaute future, 

Grouillant et fourmillant, 
Ne me repousse pas, 6 divine Nature, 

Je suis ton suppliant. 

This reads like a poem from the Greek Anthology 
translated by a French classicist, whose art teaches 
him to call to his aid all the beauties of Nature, 
even the Beauty which is to come. The poem is 
short, the divine afflatus is soon exhausted, if you 
will. But the Tanagra statuettes are none the less 
exquisite for being small. 

Moreas began to write, or rather to publish, in 
1884, when he was twenty-three. Vanier, the pub- 
lisher of Verlaine and Mallarme, published his Les 
Syrtes about this time : then, in 1886, Les Cantilenes 
appeared. The influence of Baudelaire — the sym- 
bolistic Baudelaire — is very marked therein, and 
also the influence of Verlaine. What is most strik- 
ing in these compositions of a young writer is not 
only the effort to note the mysterious, the fleeting 
and sad, the reaction against the Parnassian poetry 
and vulgar realism, but also the way in which the 
old classic instinct is seeking for expression. 

Towards 1890 those young American or English 
artists who are always fond of lionizing French 
poets were able to enjoy the spectacle of poor, sad 
old Verlaine limping along in his bedraggled 
trousers side by side with young Moreas, a perfect 
dandy with his eyeglass in his eye, looking rather 
like the Ruffian of his splendid poem. 

Moreas 's life was going to be a journey, not only 
through the cafes of Paris and Europe, but through 
French literature, starting from that of the Middle 
Ages: and when he died in 1910 his poetry had 



204 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

returned to tlie source of all true poetry, enriched 
by all that it had reflected, but calmed down into 
an ordered stoical nobility. 

Ne dites pas: la vie est un joyeux festin; 
Ou e'est d'un esprit sot ou c'est d'une ime basse. 
Surtout ne dites pas: elle est malheur sans fin; 
C'est d'un mauvais courage et qui trop tot se lasse. 

Riez comme au printemps s'agitent les rameaux, 
Pleurez comme la bise ou le flot sur la grfeve, 
Goutez tous les plaisirs et souffrez tous les maux; 
Et dites: C'est beaucoup et c'est I'ombre d'un r6ve. 

Quelle bizarre Parque au coeur capricieux 
Veut que le sort me flatte au moment qu'il me brave? 
Les maux les plus ingrats me sont presents des Dieux, 
Je trouve dans ma cendre un gout de miel suave. . . . 

Triste jusqu'^ la mort, en meme temps joyeux, 
Tout m'est concours heureux et sinistre presage. 
Sans cause I'allegresse a fleuri dans mes yeux. 
Et le sombre destin sourit sur mon visage. 

Such was the stoical equilibrium at which Moreas 
had arrived at the close of his life. But, in order 
to realize the roads he had trod, one should read 
his Pelerin Passionne, which scandalized the world 
of letters on its appearance in 1890. 

Anyone who wants to know what the Parisian 
younger generation thought of the Pelerin Passionne 
must consult the newspapers and pamphlets of the 
day. In one of them, called Fin de Siecle et Deca- 
dence, I find the following judgment: — **Le titre 
emprunte a Shakespeare n'a aucun rapport avec les 
poesies contenues dans le volume: il n^ a ni peleri- 
nage ni passion. Les vers sont libres; ils ont la 
rime, mais la mesure est absente . . . ; certains ont 
jusqu'a vingt et un pieds. . . .''* And the hostile 
critic quoted among other lines the following, which 
are certainly rather bewildering to a scholar fresh 
from his Virgil: — 

•Maurice Monteil, Fin de Siecle et Decadence, Tours, 1893. 



JEAN MOREAS 205 

On a march6 sur les fleurs au bord de la route, 

Et le vent d'automne les secoue si fort en outre. 

La malle-poste a renverse la vieille croix au bord de la route, 

Elle etait vraiment si pourrie en outre. 

L'idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route, 

Et personne ne le pleurera en outre. 

It has been said that Moreas was lacking in emo- 
tion : such things are easy to say. It is not always 
those who are continually whimpering who have the 
most feeling. Eeady tears are things of little count, 
like those rivulets which never run dry because they 
flow through chalky and infertile soil. 

Moreas had discovered that our lives, like our 
speech, were encumbered with a great deal of unnec- 
essary repetition, and he used the literary trick 
of piling Pelion upon Ossa in images, with no ap- 
parent logical connection. These three lines are the 
pattern of the style he most readily cultivated in 
his youth : — 

Pire que bonne vous futes, et je fus sage. 
Vous aviez un bouquet de cassie au corsage, 
Et votre cou cercle d'un collier de ducats. 

That was his manner. He exaggerated a trick 
of which Verlaine, Eimbaud and Tristan Corbiere 
had set the fashion, and which can be discovered 
by the careful seeker in most great poetry. But 
it was the originality of the latter Nineteenth Cen- 
tury to emphasize the process. There were painters 
with the same way of working, arranging splashes 
of color one beside the other, without any precon- 
ceived agreement of design, and leaving the public 
to compose the harmony of the picture with a mo- 
saic of colors and shades. The hearer of Debussy ^s 
works is in the same manner confronted with a 
whirlwind of dancing musical atoms, — painter and 
composer toy, the one with every bar, the other with 
every tint, progressing slowly, seeking rare sonori- 



206 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITEES 

ties or minute subtleties of color ; and often they suc- 
ceed in obtaining penetrating effects which rival 
those of Nature. Such work is the image of our 
own souls, which are like those great rooms in old 
chateaux whose echoes are so memory-laden that 
they repeat the cries of joy and pain of all hu- 
manity. To produce that effect there have striven, 
each in his own way, poets so different as Francis 
Viele-Griffin, Henri de Eegnier, Paul Fort, Camilla 
Mauclair, and Charles Guerin. 

Next, still in pursuit of his Eenaissance ideal, 
Moreas took to studying old French, adapted Au- 
cassin et Nicolette, translated the History of Jean 
de Paris, King of France. It was at this period, 
when he was under the influence of the old French 
poets, and of Eonsard and du Bellay, that he wrote 
his Eriphyle, which for every Eomanist is a pure 
masterpiece. Moreas 's Eriphyle is the same suffer- 
ing soul whom ^neas meets in Hades. 

Maestamque Eriphylen, 
crudelis nati monstrantem vulnera, cernit. 

f Essence pareille au vent leger 

J'erre 
Depuis que la vie a quitt6 

Mon corps. 
Mais les souillures et les maux du corps, 

La mort ne les eflFace. 

The appearance of the Pelerin Passionne in 1891 
had given rise to a manifestation which was soon fol- 
lowed by the foundation of the Ecole Romane. The 
members of this new Pleiade were Eaymond de la 
Tailhede, Maurice du Plessys, Charles Maurras, 
Ernest Eaynaud, and Hugues Eebell. Moreas was 
the acknowledged leader. But it was a constitu- 
tional monarchy, and the prime minister was a 
young man of subtle and penetrating mind whose 
hour of fame had just struck ; for had not the great 



JEAN MOREAS 207 

Taine climbed up the six fiigMs of stairs leading 
to the young man's flat and all because of an article 
which this same young man had written? This 
prime minister was Charles Maurras. Since those 
days he has attained a certain amount of fame. 
M. Faguet, in his Histoire de la Litterature Fran- 
gaise, boldly declares : ^ ^ The masters of French lit- 
erature at the present day are Messieurs Bergson, 
Barres, and Maurras/' Maurras at twenty was the 
same firm, complete character he is at fifty, and 
there is little doubt that it was he who pointed out 
to Moreas whither his excessive decadence and 
so-called symbolism were leading him. Moreas 
realized himself, thanks in great part to Maurras, 
and in this way, after his somewhat disturbed lin- 
guistic revolution, his verbal punctiliousness, and 
his turgid lucubrations, he returned little by little 
to classic order. 

As he grew older he came to appreciate Malherbe, 
since in a sense Malherbe is the continuation of Eon- 
sard and his art essentially an intellectual reason- 
ing art. Moreas renounced his vers lihre and the 
other novelties which had amused him in his youth. 
He saw, as Malherbe had seen, that the great 
beauty of the French language is that it is an- 
alytic; he realized that it is unwise to strain 
one's talent; further, he became convinced that 
the only true art is hellenic art and its pupil French 
art. 

The soul of Moreas is revealed to us in Les Stances, 
a kind of breviary for stoic unbelievers. Moreas, 
like his friend Charles Maurras, believed only in 
Reason, and Eeason in the Greek sense, or as the 
French classicists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth 
Centuries understood it. The perfection of art is 
the approach of the divine. 



208 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

Me voici seul enfin, tel que je devais I'Stre: 

Les jours sont revolus. 
Cea devouements couverts que tu faisais paraltre 

Ne me surprendront plus. 
Le mal que tu m'as fait et ton affreux delire 

Et ses pieges maudits, 
Depuis longtemps deja les cordes de la lyre 

Me les avaient predits. 
Au vent de ton malheur tu n'es en quelque sorte 

Qu'un f6tu ballotte. 
Mais j 'accuse surtout celui qui se comporte 

Centre sa volonte. 

Of a different order from that of Alfred de 
Musset is this poetry, with its conciseness, its bit- 
terness against the woman who betrays, its lofti- 
ness of tone and its perfection. Here a thoroughly 
disillusioned heart took refuge in poetry, seeking a 
cure for the malady of life. There is a passage 
where Moreas speaks of Goethe and La Fontaine 
which reads like a confession applied to himself : — 

"La vie artistique de Goethe, telle que Nietzsche la depeint, est 
un exemple, une raison de desesp^rer et une consolation a la fois. 
Sa fameuse serenite a quelque rapport avec le pretendu ^goisme 
de la Fontaine. Les conclusions morales, si dures parfois, du fabu- 
liste ne sont qu'une sensibility violente, mais eclairee, qui se tourne 
en derision elle-meme et se met k philosopher. Quant k Goethe, 
faites attention que s'il fixe sur le monde lin regard calme, c'est 
avec I'expression la plus triste et la plus passionnee." 

Yes, it is certainly thus that I see Moreas with 
his sorrowful yet severe temperament. M. Barres 
in his funeral oration spoke of a kind of Oriental ac- 
ceptance of life, but I think there was much more of 
profound and learned love of French poetry which 
consoled him in his life, together with a resignation 
more Olympian even than that of Alfred de Vigny. 

Moreas came at an equivocal moment, as he him- 
self said. None of the themes dear to the heart of 
the symbolists corresponded with his real tempera- 
ment. He was too Grseco-French to be a pantheist 
in the German manner, too Greek to have any real 
Christian faith. There is nothing of a Villon or 



JEAN MOEEAS 209 

a Hugo in Mm, nor of a Byron or a Swinburne. So 
that the only way open to him was to sing the 
poems of his destiny and to take refuge in the the- 
atre. The Iphigenie of Moreas calls for compari- 
son with that of Racine. Racine ^s is much more 
French, Moreas ' much closer to the Greek text ; yet 
both may fitly be cited as examples of that classic 
art whose aim is to paint the universal and attain 
the eternal beauty of which Greece has given imper- 
ishable models. 

That is the great lesson Moreas teaches us. He 
is a Platonist in the same sense as Charles Maur- 
ras. In the eyes of these two writers the human be- 
ing, be he poet or statesman, so long as he has not 
grasped the eternal reason which lies behind the 
ephemeral aspect of things, can only have fevered 
visions of reality. It is impossible to understand 
Moreas without having read Maurras 's masterpiece, 
Anthinea, For many a young Frenchman les 
Stances and Anthinea are the vade mecum which 
enables them to see themselves and their destiny 
according to the eternal laws which the Greeks 
discovered. 

A sincere examination of the hellenism of many 
Frenchmen (an exceedingly powerful factor in the 
intellectual formation of the Nineteenth Century) 
discloses the fact that we have here a phenomenon 
precisely similar to the anglomania of Taine and 
Bourget. The hellenism of Maurice de Guerin, or 
of Louis Bouilhet, or of Leconte de Lisle, and above 
all that of Louis Menard, is a reaction against the 
surroundings in which these men live. One must 
be something of a globe-trotter to appreciate prop- 
erly the Vicar of Wakefield's little garden; one must 
have suffered from one's milieu before dreaming of 
a truly ideal land. Tacitus, with the corruption of 



210 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

Rome under his eyes, imagined Germania as the 
home of virtue ; which merely means that our great- 
est certainties are really sentimental. Jules de 
Gaultier gave the name of Bovarysme to that fac- 
ulty we possess of seeing ourselves other than as we 
are : the name remains to be found for its neap rela- 
tive, the faculty of seeing the Golden Age in the 
land we do not ourselves inhabit. So that we are 
always deceiving ourselves and others : but ignorance 
is truly bliss, when it helps on progress. 

The French hellenizing poets are many. Francois 
Viele-Griffin deserves careful study. This wonder- 
ful poet with all his intuitive originality is of the 
same family as Moreas. He began by being a fero- 
cious individualist, and is now a traditionalist; and 
being an utterly disillusioned idealist, he mixes a 
very subtle irony with his stoicism. In any case, from 
la Cueille d'Avril to Swanhilde, from la Chevauchee 
d'Yeldis to V Amour Sacre, from V Amour Sacre 
to Phocas le Jardinier, we are watching the drama 
played in the poet's soul between lyric passion and 
philosophic reason. M. Henri de Regnier is the 
Andrea del Sarto of poetry. Albert Samain is also 
at times a ** perfect poet" in the style of Andre 
Chenier, but they are both lacking in the lyric in- 
toxication which is the magic quality of the poems 
of Madame de Noailles. Their vehemence is so vol- 
untary that it nips our emotion in the bud. The 
art of Madame de Noailles, on the contrary, is a part 
of her nature. We feel that the senses of sight, 
hearing, touch, smell and taste have been given her 
to use on the numberless fruits and perfumes of 
the earth. Further, she adds to them, and we are 
her accomplices. The land she lives in is the land 
of the Arabian Nights, where love is brother and 
sister to death: the Muse of Coeur innomhrahle, 



JEAN MOREAS 211 

L^Omhre des jours, Eblouissements, Les Vivants et 
les Morts, is closely connected with the Muse of 
Walt Whitman, who laughs at our set ideas of 
morality. But it must be admitted that she is su- 
perior to the American. **I think I could turn and 
live with animals, they are so placid and self- 
contained.'' Doubtless, but if we substitute for 
animals the fatalistic Orientals with their land of 
wondrous dreams, which have given birth to so 
many religions ; their landscapes, which set us mus- 
ing upon countless story and SATiibol; their towns, 
wherein sleep ages of forgotten greatness; their 
gardens, with marvellous cool and luscious fruits — 
life immediately becomes the paradise of our child- 
hood, a land of delight. 

Of course, the art of Madame de Noailles is ro- 
mantic art, and has incurred thereby the wrath of 
Charles Maurras; a fate shared by the works of 
other poetesses, such as Madame de Regnier, 
Madame Delarue-Madrus, Madame Renee Vivien. 
Who loveth well chastizeth well: that is probably 
why M. Maurras calls them Maenads. He might 
have waited for the saraband and dance to finish — 
then the lights are put out and in that unbecoming 
moment before dawn we are cold, we shiver. 

One day Madame de Noailles saw standing in her 
path the dread spectre of Death, and in her terror 
she turned towards God. 

Mais je ne vous vols pas, 6 mon Dieu, et je chante 
A cause du vide infini. . . . 

Madame de Noailles reminds one of Sygne de Cou- 
fontaine, the heroine of Claudel's play VOtage, when 
she cries: '*Les choses grandes et inouies, notre 
coeur est tel qu'il ne pent y resister.'' Adventures 
are to the adventurous: Eve proved that very 
clearly. 



CHARLES PEGUY 

I PURPOSE to study Peguy here from only one 
point of view:* as the pupil of Bergson who 
applied the master's doctrine to his own life. 
Studies have already been written of Peguy, but all 
that I have seen consider him from the outside, see- 
ing in him only the Socialist, the politician, pam- 
phleteer and patriot, except perhaps Suares's little 
work, with all its sympathy and delicate insight, 
where grief speaks words dictated by friendship. 

To say, for example, that Orleans and its Cathe- 
dral throw their vast shadow over Peguy *s soul and 
explain his love for Joan of Arc is to consider Pe- 
guy in one attitude; a very favorite attitude if you 

•This chapter was already written when M. Doumic, on the day he 
received M. Bergson into the French Academy (Jan. 24, 1918), said 
in his reply to M. Bergson's speech: 

"Dans la foule de vos auditeurs, il est un groupe que je tiens & 
distinguer tout particulierement : celui des jeunes gens. C'est parmi 
eux que vous avez trquve vos plus fervents admirateurs. . . . Pas 
un de vos cours oti Ton n'aper^At, dans son eternel capuchon de 
ratine bleue, qui lui donnait I'air d'un ^colier de la rue du Fouarre, 
ce g^nereux Charles Peguy, qui lui-mSme 6tait un des guides suivia 
par la meilleure jeunesse." 

In treating of the influence of Bergson upon P^guy, I am of 
course deliberately leaving on one side a whole host of facts which 
are the woof of a man's life, and which in themselves are by no 
means negligible. It is impossible to exhaust the whole reality of 
facts in order to arrive at absolute and entire truth; one is lucky 
If one can arrive at a part of truth. Clearly, over and above the 
feelings and ideas which Peguy had — if one trusts his writings and 
personal testimony — there must have been many others acting upon 
him from time to time. It may always be said of any study of a 
writer, that it does not contain the whole man. If Peguy is studied 
here as falling under the Bergsonian sway, it is because that appears 
to me to be the real P6guy, the P^guy who influences his contempo- 
raries. After all ; — influence — that is the whole of the question. 

212 



CHARLES PEGUY 213 

will, but still a single attitude. To explain his so- 
called socialism, or Ms patriotism, by Ms ancestors, 
the Orleanais vine-growers and peasants, is to be 
the dupe of so-called scientific formulas. For, after 
all, not every Orleanais is an admirer of Joan of 
Arc, nor is every descendant of peasants necessa- 
rily a socialist or a patriot. 

The foundation of Peguy^s character seems to 
have been an indomitable will. A son of the people, 
— of a mother who recaned the chairs of Orleans 
Cathedral, and for whom he had always the most 
filial respect and love, — he taught himself because 
he so willed it ; entered the Ecole Normale Superieure 
because he so willed it ; left it for the same reason ; 
founded, at the age of twenty-five, his Eeview, Les 
Cahiers de la Quimaine, by his own force of will; 
and never rested from the struggle of opposing his 
will to other men's throughout a life of ceaseless 
contest. 

Barres, in the article* he devoted to Peguy on the 
news of his heroic death on the battlefield of the 
Marne, speaks of the wondrous radiance emanating 
from his personality. V. Boudon, one of the sol- 
diers of his regiment, who has published an account 
of the marches and countermarches in the first weeks 
of the campaign — all too brief, alas ! for Peguy — 
has tried to tell us of the impression produced on 
his soldiers by their heroic officer.f Clearly, with 
such a writer the least detail is of importance. But 
once the nobility, saintliness, or greatness of a hero 
acknowledged, there always comes a moment when 
we must try to enter into our subject, and find out 
on what food the writer's soul was nourished. 

""Echo de Paris, 17 Sept., 1914. 

iV. Boudon. Avec Charles Peguy. De la Lorraine a la Marne 
Paris, 1916. 



214 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITEES 

Now, from the day when he first met with it, 
Bergson's philosophy never ceased to inspire Pe- 
guy. Peguy is Bergson^s most brilliant pupil; not 
his most brilliant university, scholastic pupil, but 
his most brilliant free-lance pupil. The greater 
part of his Cahiers are the best, the liveliest, exist- 
ing commentary on the philosophy of Bergson. 

Peguy 's criticism is Bergsonian, his theology is 
Bergsonian, his style is Bergsonian. I do not mean 
that Peguy is a pale imitation of Bergson, or a ser- 
vile copyist; on the contrary he is a highly original 
thinker who applies the Bergsonian ideas to criti- 
cism, history, religion and life itself, and makes of 
them the inspiration of his writing. 

**Lotte* was saved from materialism by the Berg- 
sonian philosophy, of which Peguy made him an 
enthusiastic neophyte. This liberation of Lotte is 
attested to by a study published by him in 1907, and 
which is a succinct exposition of Bergsonism in con- 
nection Avith Creative Evolution. ^ ^f 

But even if we had not Mgr. BattifoPs testimony, 
we have the texts of Peguy 's writings, which are a 
thousand times more instructive than any outside 
information. We have not only the pages in which 
he honors his master, but also those inspired by that 
master's ideas; finally, we have the fact of his evo- 
lution. 

M. Maurras explains Peguy 's ** volte-face'' by 
what he calls the ''coup de T anger." *^Du jour ou 
les effets de ces actes anciens se prononcerent contre 
la force de la patrie, c.a.d. si je ne me trompe, au 
lendemain du coup de Tanger, Charles Peguy se 

*Lotte became Peguy's intimate friend from the day they met at 
the Lye6e St. Barbe. On the news of Peguy's death he enlisted in 
a fighting regiment and was soon killed. For further details of this 
touching story of a friendship, see J. Pacary's book on Lotte. 

tP. XIII of Mgr. Battifol's Preface. 



CHAELES PEGUY 215 

revolta. ... II se declara patriote ardent, mili- 
tariste passione, serviteur de la tradition nationale 
jusqn 'a la mort. ' ' (Action Frangaise, September 18, 
1914.) 

Between the Jeanne d'Arc of 1897 which Pegny 
signed with the name Beaudouin, and the Mystere 
de la Charite de Jeanne d'Arc which burst upon 
Paris in 1910 and aroused so much polemic, thir- 
teen years intervened, thirteen years of incessant 
combat, first for Dreyfus, then for the ideas Peguy 
held dear. But if anyone will take the trouble to 
read the first Jeanne d'Arc after the second, he will 
find the explanation of Peguy ^s so-called volte-face. 

There is a deepening of thought, a progression, 
in the Bergsonian sense of the word, a steady broad- 
ening of personality. Peguy grew always on the 
sentiment side, and the impulse in this direction 
came from Bergson; he dug deeper and deeper with 
the spade his master handed him. 

It would, of course, be ridiculous to deny the in- 
fluence of national and international political events 
upon each one of us in his daily life, more especially 
in youth when the mind is forming. Peguy, by very 
reason of his education which had taught him all 
that men owe to the past, was bound to feel an af- 
front to his country more deeply than an ordinary 
man. The year 1905 was a decisive date in Peguy 's 
life, when France was threatened with German inva- 
sion, and when ^ ' the immanence of this invasion was 
a reality.'^ Many another Frenchman, after pass- 
ing through the same anxious hours, had hencefor- 
ward but one idea, the strengthening of his coun- 
try. But Peguy did not have to wait for the Tangier 
affair to learn the lesson of patriotism — for that it 
is quite enough to be born on the banks of the Loire. 

On the other hand, when one remembers all Pe- 



216 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

guy's quarrels with the Sorbonne (which occurred 
at the same time as those of M. Pierre Lasserre, 
with whom, however, he has so little in common), one 
sees that it is the humanist in Peguy, the good pupil 
of those good humanists of the University of France, 
the ^^normalian^' fresh from his classics, as well as 
the patriot which brought the whole-hearted Drey- 
fusard of 1899, all these led him not to the renuncia- 
tion of his past, but to the perception of certain 
realities, to the realization of the fact that all the 
fine phrasing of political programmes only served 
for the advancement of plotters and climbers and 
trimmers, and did little or nothing for the happi- 
ness of a great nation. 

From the moment when Peguy really entered into 
Bergson's realm, — having realized that our feel- 
ings, far from being contemptible, have their source 
in the depths of reality ; having understood that the 
great spiritual currents which carry us out of our- 
selves make us create the only true reality — from 
that moment he went forward upon his journey to 
Damascus, though it must be admitted that he had 
long discovered which way that journey lay. The 
perfect understanding between Bergson and Peguy 
— that is to say, between a man of Jewish descent 
and an Orleanais — is not an extraordinary phe- 
nomenon when we remember that the Christian reli- 
gion is founded upon the Old Testament, and that 
Bergson was nourished on all that is most purely 
French and is the disciple of Maine de Biran and 
of Eavaisson.* 

•Maine de Biran and Ravaisson based their doctrine firmly upon 
the theory that the development of our knowledge was comprehensible 
only if we believed that the spirit was above and before all a mysteri- 
ous force reacting upon matter. Ravaisson declared that in its asso- 
ciation with the brain the mind drank the waters of Lethe. And 
Bergson was to say in his turn that cerebral activity was only an 
infinitely small part of mental activity. The brain contented itself 



CHAELES PEGUY 217 

Peguy's protest — so instinctive and so sincere — 
against sabotage springs from all that is deepest in 
him and in France. ^^L^ouvrier qui endommage son 
on til est un fou qui se mutile lui-meme.'' Peguy 
speaks here in the name of all great workmen. And 
Bergson who wrote so finely of man^s tools, and of 
VHomo faher, could not have expressed the truth 
better. *^ J'ai vu dans mon enfance rempailler des 
chaises, du meme esprit et du meme coeur et de la 
meme main que ce meme peuple avait taille des 
Cathedrales. * ' There speaks the son of that admi- 
rable Orleanaise. But it needs no great perspicacity 
to see that this deep filial love is animated by Berg- 
son's doctrine of art and human work; the doctrine 
that everything holds together in a system of meta- 
physics, in a religion. 

It might then be said that it was his innate honesty, 
his instinctive generosity, and the natural upright- 
ness he inherited from his forefathers, which pre- 
vented Peguy 's accepting any subversive doctrines; 
but it must also be added that his master's philoso- 
phy brought to him each year a very precious element 
of encouragement and emulation. In this connec- 
tion there is one of Peguy 's numerous Cahiers which 
one would like to quote in its entirety : that of Feb- 
ruary 3, 1907, in which, after giving us the little 
masterpiece of the brothers Tharaud, Bar-Cochebas, 
he continues his meditating ^^on the present situa- 
tion in the modern world of history, sociology and 

with translating into terms of motion a small part of what was hap- 
pening in our consciousness; there was infinitely more in a human 
consciousness than in the corresponding brain. If, then, to these 
ideas we add the theory that the instinctive knowledge one species 
possesses about another on a particular point has its root in the 
unity of life, we easily realize the dignity of spiritual life, and can 
place this spiritual life not only in deeply poetic dreams as Maeter- 
linck did, but in religious meditation as Peguy does, and above all 
in the respect of everything which is the outcome of the Spirit. 



218 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

the intellectual party." It seems as if Peguy, with 
his ears still full of Bergson's doctrines, wanted to 
clarify them by applying them to the surrounding 
world and reality; and in particular to destroy the 
modern theory that man and humanity may be 
known and understood ^^by means of a system of 
properly arranged documentary slips." And he 
does it so amusingly, and in such Bergsonian fash- 
ion, and in truth in so many fashions, and with so 
many parentheses, that the first effect is rather be- 
wildering. 

There is no idea upon which Peguy loves more to 
dwell than this distinction between theory and prac- 
tice, because metaphysics, as he understands the 
word, is for him the only direct way of research for 
knowledge, physics being only an attempt at indi- 
rect knowledge administered by the intermediate 
ministry of the senses. 

Analysis, which is so necessary for the discov- 
ery of the secret of things when these things are 
machinery, is exactly the factor which blinds us and 
prevents our seeing a living thing from the inside. 
The locks of nature are not the locks of industry. 
Science can only arrive at a knowledge of pheno- 
mena which repeat themselves, but the phenomena 
of the soul, w^hich so seldom repeat themselves, es- 
cape it. So that we always come back to that article 
of the Bergsonian faith : genius is not talent carried 
to a very high degree; ^^ genius is something given, 
like life itself." 

This view of Bergson's made a deep impression 
upon Peguy ; on a mind, that is, which of itself had 
already recognized intuitively the abyss which sepa- 
rates immortal and living work from ephemeral lit- 
erary production. These words of Bergson^s ex- 
plained to him the presentiments he had had while 



CHAELES PEGUY 219 

reading certain books or studying certain pictures 
in the Louvre. 

PegTiy gave his most vigorous expression of this 
view in his Cahier of 1906: De la situation faite a 
Vhistoire et a la sociologie dans les temps modernes 
(November 4, 1906). Later on, when he returned 
to the faith of his childhood, he transported the dis- 
tinction into the domain of religion : by substituting 
the word ^^ grace'' for the word '* genius," as Pascal 
seems to me to have done also, and making this 
transposition of the Bergsonian doctrine perfectly 
natural. The world of metaphysics is smaller than 
might first appear. This Cahier could have been 
written only by a man convinced of the truth in 
the Bergsonian doctrine that there is an invincible 
internal opposition between works of genius and 
works of intellect. 

There are within us obscure regions : our sub- 
liminal self is so mysterious, so complex and forever 
changing, that it can really express itself only in the 
harmony of numbers. Music is the idealized ex- 
pression of our invisible continuous subconscious 
life, ' ^ arithmetic a nescientis se numerare animi/^ as 
Leibnitz puts it. We may be able to understand 
our purely material actions, our animal automatism, 
and to grasp the meaning of the workings of our 
ego, but we are brought to a standstill on the thresh- 
old of that far off land, where we sometimes listen 
for news of the unknown. Now there is one thing 
which gives us an eloquent glimpse of that region 
which, for mystics, is nothing but the mind of God, 
and for sensualists nothing but vibrations of matter. 
It is genius. 

The Puritans, who had so high an idea of the om- 
nipotence of God and of the impotence of man, were 
much nearer Eeality than our hedonist communities. 



220 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

There is profound truth behind their credo, only it 
is much deeper even than they thought. Genius, 
like the grace of God, is that irreducible, inexpli- 
cable driving power which is merged into life itself. 

In 1904 in his Cahier Israel Zangwill (Chad 
Gadya, translated by Mathilde Salomon) Peguy 
had made his examination of conscience, still under 
the influence of Bergson, and had asked himself what 
Taine or Renan had given to the modern world. He 
said rightly or wrongly (this is not the point here) 
that their method was far from faultless and that, 
there as everywhere, the great debating ground of 
modern thought is nothing other than the old one 
of Science and Art. I have not the space to analyze 
Peguy ^s Preface, which takes up some ninety pages; 
but never was he more true to himself, never more 
inspired in his criticism of the Taine method. 

Lovers of Bergson, however, may be glad to meet 
again with some of Bergson 's favorite axioms, as 
Peguy brandishes them against his foes. Among 
others he uses the idea that the **forces de connais- 
sance ne sont rien aupres de nos forces de vie et de 
nos ressources ignorees, nos forces de connaissance 
etant d'ailleurs nous, et nos forces de vie au con- 
traire etant plus que nous'*; for **nos connaissances 
ne sont rien aupres de la realite connaissable, et 
d'autant plus, peutetre, aupres de la realite incon- 
naissable,'* etc., etc. (pp. LXXXIV a LXXXV, 
Zangwill), 

Thus, as early as 1904, Peguy, socialist and free- 
thinker, believed in the perpetual openness of our 
soul to new influx of light : a theory which is proved 
by the ever increasing idealism of English and 
French literature. Show me the men who will make 
history, and after that we will talk of scientific 
methods. 



GHAELES PEGUY 221 

In this way Bergson liad come to his help, drawn 
him out of his pride (**orgueil enfantin des doctes 
et des avertis*') and encouraged him to combat those 
conceptions of history which make progress depend 
upon purely material conditions. And then, as we 
know, the great figure of Joan of Arc had long been 
taking shape in his mind. For not only have the 
martyrs of all causes been characterized by their 
indifference to material pleasures, and to economic 
life, but they are the agents of that life which, in 
its marvellous spontaneity and inner richness, is 
irreducible to thought. The great vital impulse 
transcends our experience and our consciousness, 
and the result is that side by side with the truths of 
reasoning there are truths of action and truths of 
intuition. 

Bergson declares that the spiritual impulse which 
reaches its perfection only in the mind of man is 
the greatest of all realities. Henceforward the con- 
sequences are clear. There are in the universe other 
relationships than the mechanical relationships of 
impenetrable atoms. There are intimate, inner re- 
lationships, so deep that they transcend Eeason and 
make of her their servant. In any deeply religious 
or patriotic enterprise one realizes that man dies 
for an ideal cause. The World War was waged by 
us for a truth, for a faith. And the realm of the 
Spirit must be very powerful indeed to force some 
peoples to renounce their prejudices and make them- 
selves the soldiers of Justice. But Peguy did not 
wait for the World War to realize these great truths. 
A nation never seemed to him a heap of stones, an 
aggregate of gravel from which a few silexes may 
be removed without changing anything. A man's 
native land did not appear to him merely as a col- 
lection of acres of soil, but a living body, the body 



222 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

wHcli the Spirit — or, let us say, the vital impulse — 
had given to Justice. 

With a man of such double or triple foundation 
as Peguy, account must needs be taken of his inter- 
est in the Jewish question. No other Frenchmen 
went into the ** anti-Semite'' question with so much 
force and passion for a persecuted race. George 
Eliot seems lukewarm beside him. Let it be said to 
the eternal honor of a soul thirsting after justice 
that he spoke with truth on this matter, sine ira et 
studio. The result was curious, in that the study of 
the Jewish question plunged Peguy deeper still into 
Catholicism. Here one must quote Peguy himself : 

** Israel nous a donne le Dieu meme. Rome nous 
a donne le seule repartition du monde ou ce Dieu 
pouvait mouler son nouvel empire. Plusieurs fois 
et notamment dans V Argent Suite Peguy* avait 
entrepris de nous representer ce qu'il nomme la 
legation du monde temporel a Jesus. Nulle part 
autant que dans Eve, on ne sentira cette inmiense 
preparation poetique, philosophique, militaire et 
gouvernmentale qui se disposait dans le meme temps 
qu 'Israel poursuivant la longue preparation de race 
et de peuple."t Peguy is like Bergson, a believer 
in the divine truth of things, but he goes farther 
than his master. But the one is a philosopher, the 
other almost a priest. 

Bergsonian philosophy, and sympathy with the 
Jews: such are the great currents flowing into Pe- 
guy 's religion, feeding it, and leading him to write 
his three Mysteres de Jeanne d'Arc, and his great 
poems. Perhaps one should also add the profound 

*A friend is supposed to speak in Peguy's name. 

tThis article, although signed by Lotte, seems to me to be by 
P6guy. Jean Pascary tells us, in this connection, "Cette etude sur 
Eve represente un type particulier de collaboration entre Lotte et 
P6guy.» 



CHAELES PEGUY 223 

feeling of human solidarity, whicli is merged with 
Peguy — as with Clandel and many other writers — 
into the love of Fame, the desire to survive. (The 
last feature is still more striking when one studies 
Claudel.) Andre Snares has a very good passage 
about this in his study of Peguy (Preface to the 
fourth volume of Peguy 's CEuvres Completes). 

*^ Passion de la gloire dans le coeur d'un enfant 
ingenu et dans Pame d'un adolescent qui vole vers 
son reve! C^est un feu pour toute la vie. On a 
beau Petouffer: il est toujours la qui veille. On 
1 'epure. On mue la chaleur en lumiere. On s 'eleve 
meme a la saint ete. Mais en ceux qui ont bu de ce 
sang heroi'que a guise de lait, ce premier amour est 
le foyer qui ne s'eteint qu'avec Pexistence; et dans 
leur mort meme, je gage, si Pon savait chercher, 
qu'il y a ce tison de soleil, au fond du coeur: la 
gloire. ' ' 

That is all true. But, enamored as Peguy may 
have been of glory, he was still more passionately 
attached to the idea he believed to be essential, that 
of human solidarity. It is that spirit which ani- 
mates his socialistic sketch Marcel (1898), a work 
of the highest optimism which shows us the City of 
the Future as a reign of perfect happiness, mar- 
vellous harmony and absolute justice. 

The generosity of his nature, which made him, 
when he was quite young, embrace socialism as the 
doctrine best satisfying his conscience, and which 
later led to his revolt against politics as certain 
men understand them ; the violent rancor and bitter 
disgust which seizes him when he sees what certain 
so-called statesmen have made of his dream — all 
this is important for the reader who seeks to under- 
stand the real Peguy. Tired with the contest, heart- 
wrung at what he has seen, he turns away to knock at 



224 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITERS 

the door of the City of God. The would-be reformer 
reforms himself. Denied the splendor of a states- 
man, he longs for the halo of a saint. 

Thus Bergson helped Peguy to see clearly that the 
roots of his thoughts, striking down into an eternal 
past, gave him his holiest and most solid support. 
**Such a doctrine,'' as Bergson himself says, **does 
not only facilitate speculation, it gives us also more 
power to act and to live. For with it we feel our- 
selves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no 
longer seems isolated in the nature that it domi- 
nates. ' ' 

Ever since his earliest studies in classical and 
French literature, Peguy had felt the working of 
this strong current of deep-seated sympathy which 
forced him to recognize that *4ife is not contained 
in the category of the many nor in that of the one, ' ' 
that mechanical causality cannot give a sufficient 
interpretation of the vital process, that our con- 
sciousness by expanding more and more introduces 
us into life's own domain, which is reciprocal inter- 
penetration and creation. 

If Peguy never wavered from that conviction, it 
is because his instinct, his upbringing, the influence 
of classical antiquity and of his master, Bergson, 
all united to plunge him deeper and deeper into 
the way of life he had chosen — with its aim of 
making classical culture supreme in the cause of 
true liberty. That is the explanation of the pro- 
found feeling animating the pages of Notre Patrie, 
or his splendid hymn to the Virgin Hypatia {Bar 
Cochebas), of that ardent humanism we admire in 
so many of his Cahiers, and finally of his conception 
of history not only as a great art broadening our 
outlook, but as the narrative of the divine on earth. 
It is quite easy to sneer at the '^ Bible of History" 



CHAELES PEGUY 225 

idea, and to laugh at the suggestion that all human 
affairs are but a misty revelation of the divine: 
the new French history school indeed shows us how 
that may be done. But Peguy will not allow his- 
tory to escape from the domain of literature. In 
his edition of Chad Gadya, he had remarked how 
history can never be more than imperfect readings 
of reality, and that he alone is worthy of the name 
of historian who, having weighed all the evidence 
obtainable from the best sources, has the warmest 
human sympathy, the highest human imagination. 

The unity of the posthumous work Clio lies in this 
idea that history is not and cannot be a science, be- 
cause history is not a scientific deduction but a 
literary description of fact, an intelligent sympa- 
thetic narrative of events, and at times a more or 
less successful guess at the most human causes and 
effects. Therein, according to Peguy, lies the im- 
portance of literature: the pages of the classics 
are facts which deceive no one and which teach 
us most about human nature. Therein also lies the 
importance of memoirs, and chronicles, and of every 
document which can throw light upon the mechanism 
of our faculties and passions. This man, then, who 
was never tired of studying Homer and Virgil in 
the text, who wrote such wonderfully acute pages 
on Corneille, Racine, Beaumarchais, Victor Hugo, 
had realized that no man of talent has ever cut 
away his roots, the roots of his race; and here the 
importance he attaches to ethnography comes to him 
from Renan as well as from Bergson. 

Clio is a long commentary on this truth, that a 
line of Homer, a chorus of Sophocles, a few words 
of Hesiod, reveal to us in a wonderful way *4es 
augustes profondeurs du monde antique. '* Such a 
conception of the artistic method in history — in 



226 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

spite of a momentary distrust of the views and ways 
of the mind — is imposed upon Peguy by the Berg- 
sonian idea of duration. That is made quite clear 
in Clio, It is because Duration admits of no dis- 
tinction between past, present and future, because 
the past exists in the present, that history can be 
written, thanks to memory, which is an inner search- 
ing of one's self, a spiritual resurrection. 

The philosopher most akin to Peguy on this point 
is the modern Italian, Benedetto Croce — who de- 
clares that history comprises all literature. Peguy 
may very possibly have read Benedetto Croce. In 
any case he was soaked in Michelet, who knew his 
Vico by heart, and Vico had great influence upon 
Benedetto Croce.* 

The mere fact of conceiving the mind as an ever- 
working, essentially dynamic activity explains how 
it is that writers, differing so widely on many points, 
have reached the same conclusion, in order to prove 
as far as they can the dynamic aspect of reality. 
This conclusion is essentially favorable to religion, 
for it emphasizes the undivided continuity of con- 
science and, by thus bringing all beings into closer 
connection, cannot evade the idea that a great spir- 
itual force directs the universe. This realization of 
the solidarity of all beings, and consequently of God 
and man, was bound to bring Peguy back to the 
religion of his ancestors, to a community of ideas 
with all his people. 

The essential aim of Clio is to show us that his- 
tory, real history, is not what we read, not the rec- 
ords of an uncertain past, wave-worn wrecks on the 
ocean of the ages, but that it is what we are, what 

*The reader should consult Professor Wildon-Carr'a brilliant lec- 
ture, "Time and History in Contemporary Philosophy, with special 
reference to Bergson and Croce" (Proceedings of British Academy^ 
Vol. VIII). 



CHARLES PEGUY 227 

we have been, what we cannot prevent ourselves 
becoming. The idea, as George Eliot expressed it, 
that ''our life is determined for us, and it makes 
the mind very free when we give up wishing and only 
think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing 
what is given us to do'' is complicated in Peguy by 
the other idea that France has a definite mission 
to accomplish in the world. So that — as moralist, 
or as disciple of Michelet, or of Hugo, or, as he 
would have liked to say, as disciple of Joinville — 
he adapts the Bergsonian theory that we must in- 
stall ourselves within the movement. Gesta Dei per 
Francos, Convinced as he is that nations do not 
march to the slaughter house guided by blind forces 
or by the mere action and reaction of cause and 
effect, artificial divisions of duration, he desires to 
see in the efforts of Athens, Rome and Paris one 
and the same continuative gesture, which is an over- 
coming of matter, a triumph of mind. 

That sentence of Bergson's, ''Duration is a mate- 
rial and not merely a formal element of the world, ' ' 
which is so mysterious for the uninitiated, has a 
very clear meaning in Peguy 's Clio, and it also ex- 
plains Peguy 's theory, which has scandalized many 
of his readers, that humanitarian Europe and 
France of 1848, revolutionary Europe and France 
of 1789, humanistic Europe and France of the Six- 
teenth Century, are all sisters of the Europe and 
France of the Middle Ages adoring their God-made 
Man. His anthropomorphism is Bergsonism. Who 
will may laugh — but his greatness is not to be 
denied. Peguy has only one aim : to render human- 
ity greater, graver, more human, more humane, 
more humanistic, more careful of mind, of culture, 
of goodness and of the solidarity uniting all created 
beings. That is the explanation of this hatred of 



228 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITEES 

our meclianical age witli its so-called conquest of 
matter and of the mechanizing of French Thought 
by those ** scientific'' methods which make of French- 
men the Pomeranian grenadiers of a proud but 
futile learning. 

We must come back to the Cahier Bar-Cochehas to 
understand his point of view. **We are witnessing 
a kind of explosion of scientific industry. Man has 
subdued matter, but has at the same time submit- 
ted to it. Science has become theorized industry. 
Our thought has become mechanical, at once the 
image and slave of our machines. We must make 
war upon matter and for that purpose have recourse 
to metaphysics. Metaphysics alone can give us a 
direct knowledge of reality. 

* * Great metaphysical systems are like great races, 
nothing other than the languages of Creation. Each 
new great philosopher is a man who has discovered 
some new aspect in Reality. He is a man taking 
part, in his turn and with his own voice, in the 
eternal concert. There are some airs that have 
never been played twice to humanity. Practice and 
technique may advance in continued progress, but 
not metaphysics. Metaphysics belong to the order 
of time; they are une reussite, they might or might 
not have happened." And since everything is 
deeply bound up together, Peguy sees in the French- 
man's power of invention, in his faculty for throw- 
ing off a yoke and of falling to rise higher, the real 
source of the greatness of his race. 

More than that, the Frenchman is the man who 
best understands instinctively and intuitively what 
Duration really is. He contributes towards making 
the world of history an ever fresh reality. Every- 
one knows those famous, and so very Bergsonian, 
pages where Carlyle proves that Cromwell was 



CHARLES PEGUY 229 

never a hypocrite. Even so the Frenchman has 
never his career mapped out, nor is his world ever 
a precontrived puppet show moved by wood and 
wire. 

Everything, once more, combined: the Greek and 
Roman idea of civilization, and the Christian idea 
of a God-made Man, and the revolutionary idea of 
human progress, to fix Peguy the more firmly in his 
own theories. 

**Et Parbre de la race est lui-meme etemel.^'* 
# # « # 

Such is the explanation of the Mysteres de Jeanne 
d'ArCy and all those works written in the last four 
or five years of his life, when Peguy, after making 
political and mystic acquaintance with the natural 
and supernatural world, aspires only to participa- 
tion in the solidarity of Christendom — one might 
almost say longs to merge himself into Joan 
of Arc. 

The Jeanne d'Arc of 1897 is a drama inspired by 
Michelet. It is a story of the Maid — a story cut up 
into a series of tableaux — in which his passion for 
liberty shines forth in all its glory. Le Mystere de la 
Charite de Jeanne d'Arc is a meditation upon the 
Passion of Christ, and upon the problem of evil and 
suffering. But between 1897 and 1910 a great deal 
has happened, and not a little blood has been shed. 
Peguy 's aim now is to translate into the plane of 
theology not only what Bergson says in the plane 
of metaphysics, but also what he has led his pupils 
to believe. Anyone reflecting upon certain conse- 
quences of the Bergsonian teaching upon Time and 
God is led quite naturally to the conflict which exists 

*Students of this vast question of History as Art or Science should 
consult M. Henri Berr's valuable book, La synthese en histoire, and 
Mr. Trevelyan's Clio, a Muse. 



230 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

in every religious soul between the idea of God's 
goodness and the reality of evil.* 

This is a book of literary criticism, and it would 
therefore be out of place to enter into the heart of 
theological debate in the midst of what Montaigne 
calls ^Hhis coile and hurly-burly of so many Philo- 
sophical wits.'' Besides, the question of Peguy's 
religion is far from being decided, and probably 
never will be. Charles Maurras judged it as ** cap- 
able de desordres immenses." Pascary declares 
Peguy to be * ^un catholique trop incomplet. ' ' Suares 
boldly affirms that Peguy was a born heretic and 
was heretical in all his creeds. Even Monsignor 
Battifol admits that Peguy 's religion was ruled by 
a mysticism which, like all mysticisms, is exposed to 
the temptation of becoming ^^libertaire" and agnos- 
tic. We may leave them to their debate and merely 
study how the idea of the divinity presents itself to 
Peguy. 

Here Peguy seems to me to be a pure pragmatist. 
(For there is a close relationship between William 
James's teaching and that of Bergson and Professor 
Schiller.) We must not forget that Bergson 's God 
is not identical with nature. God expresses Him- 
self — or tries to express Himself — by conquering 
the conditions which oppose His freedom. He lives 
in duration. He is really a living God, because in 
this way His creation is full of surprises, and He 
never dwells upon the cold and abstract heights of 
the Absolute. ^^The prince of darkness may be a 
gentleman as we are told he is, but whatever the 
God of earth and heaven is. He can surely be no 
gentleman. His menial services are needed in the 

*Tlie reader may refer to a fine poem by Mr. Cloudesley Brereton, 
Contemporary Review, June, 1914, in which he will see a sincere 
admirer of Bergson asking himself the same question as Peguy did. 



CHARLES PEGUY 231 

dust of our human trials, even more than His dig- 
nity is needed in the empyrean.''* God can only 
act in and through matter, and matter, though sep- 
arable from His being, is inseparable from his ac- 
tions. Peguy, after his ^ ^ conversion, ' ' will naturally 
be orthodox, but this conception of Bergson's is 
always at the back of his mind. For most English 
readers an excellent introduction to Peguy 's Mys- 
teres would be Professor Schiller's Riddles of the 
Sphinx. The chapter which Professor Schiller de- 
votes to the relations between man and God, his as- 
sertion of *Hhe finiteness of God" which *4s prima- 
rily the assertion of the knowableness of the world, 
of the commensurateness of the Deity with our in- 
telligence" enables one to understand many of Pe- 
guy 's bold sayings. This for example: **Les cal- 
culs de Dieu par nous peuvent ne tomber pas juste ; 
Dieu, par le mystere de la liberte, s 'est mis dans les 
mains de sa creature. Litteralement les saints com- 
mandent la volonte de Dieu et la dirigent. ' 'f 

Another passage from Professor Schiller ex- 
presses in more precise form than Peguy 's words 
what Peguy felt in his heart : ^ ^ God cannot be happy 
while there is misery in the world. God cannot be 
perfect while evil endures, nor eternal, nor change- 
less, while the aim of the world process is unrealized. 
If we suffer. He must suffer; if we sin. He must 
expiate our Sin. "J 

Peguy 's attitude, with which many reproach him 
because it may seem to be lowering God, making 
Him speak like a venerable graybeard who sent His 
son upon earth, has naturally occasioned much criti- 
cism. ^ * Mais moi qui ne suis pas vertueux, dit Dieu, 

•William James, Pragmatism, p. 72. 

\Entretiens avec J. Lotte, p. 340. 

XRiddlea of the Sphinx ^ p. 431. 



232 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITEES 

Je ne pousse pas des ens et je ne suis pas scandal- 
ise/^ etc.* 

This passage only needs for commentary Profes- 
sor Schiller ^s words: 

**The conception of a Deity absorbed in perfect, 
unchanging and eternal bliss is a blasphemy upon 
the Divine energy which might be permitted to the 
heathen ignorance of Aristotle, but which should 
be abhorred by all who have learnt the lesson of the 
Crucifixion. A theology which denies that the im- 
perfection of the world must be reflected in the sor- 
rows of the Deity simply shows itself blind to the 
deepest and truest meaning of the figure of Him 
that was ^a man of sorrows and acquainted with 
grief and deaf to the gospel of divine sympathy 
with the world. Thus the world-process is the proc- 
ess of the redemption alike of God, of the world, 
and of our own selves.'^! 

And again to those words I would add these of 
Peguy: 

^'Toute la faiblesse, et peut-etre faut-il dire la 
faiblesse croissante, de I'Eglise dans le monde mod- 
erne vient non pas, comme on le croit, de ce que la 
Science aurait monte centre la Eeligion des sys- 
temes soi-disant invincibles, non pas de ce que la 
Science aurait decouvert, aurait trouve centre la 
Eeligion des arguments, des raisonnements cense- 
ment victorieux, mais de ce que ce qui reste du monde 
Chretien socialement manque aujourd'hui profonde- 
ment de charite. Ce n'est point du tout le raisonne- 
ment qui manque. C'est la charite. Tons ces rai- 
sonnements, tons ces systemes, tons ces arguments 
pseudo-scientifiques ne seraient rien, ne peseraient 

*Mystere des Saints Innocents, p. 80. 
\ Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 431. 



CHARLES PEGUY 233 

pas lourd, s^il y avait une once de charite."* 
If I had to choose one from among Peguy's greater 
works, I think it would be the poem he called Le 
Porche du Mystere de la Deuxieme Vertu and in 
which he sings of Hope. Into it he put the purest 
part of his heart and faith. It is a spiritualisation 
of Bergson's doctrine: ^^11 n'y a que ce qui change 
qui dure ^ ' : the becoming and the permanent are not 
two contraries; they are one and the same thing. 
By a real touch of genius, Peguy shows that man's 
becoming guarantees the permanence of the word 
of God: 

*'0 miser e, 6 bonheur, c'est de nous qu'il (Dieu) 
depend. . . . 

Nous qui ne sommes rien, qui ne durons pas, . . . 

. . . C'est encore nous qui sommes chargees de con- 
server et de nourrir eternelles 

Sur terre 

Les paroles dites, les paroles de Dieu . . .'' etc., 
etc.f 
One is almost tempted into saying that what Berg- 
son calls Time, Peguy calls Hope. The whole poem 
must be read in order to understand Peguy 's tem- 
perament. One of the most beautiful passages is 
that where he describes a wood-cutter working all 
alone in a forest on a mid- winter's day: his teeth 
chatter, for the wind chills him to the bone; he is 
miserably cold. Suddenly he bethinks himself of 
his wife, who is such a good housekeeper, and of 
his children who are playing by the fireside. And 

*Charles Peguy — Notre jeunesse, p. 136. 

tPp. 108, 109, 110, 111 — Le porche du mystere de la deuxieme 
vertu. 



234 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

this mirage of the warm cosy cottage cheers the 
woodman's loving paternal heart. Passages such 
as this make us think of the pictures on old manu- 
scripts, for Peguy is at one with those illuminators 
who paint the work of the fields with their ingenu- 
ous brushes: so also the Passion of Christ in the 
Mystere de la Charite de Jeanne d^Arc recalls the 
Crucifixions in mediaeval missals. The wood-cutter 
is symbolical not only of Jesus, *Hhe man who 
hoped, ' ' as Peguy puts it, but of God who centers all 
his hopes in man, while man concentrates all his 
hopes in God ; and in this wonderful relation between 
the Deity and mankind, man tyrannizes over God 
even as God tyrannizes over man, and both continue 
creating heroes and saints for ever. Faith plays, 
Charity loves, but Hope leads the Eternal Power to 
Creation. 

It is in this way that Peguy 's art is the outcome 
of his deepest feeling. His charity which, like his 
wood-cutter's thought, is the absolute opposite of 
the Lucretian Suave mart magno, is closely con- 
nected with his theology — God, acting ceaselessly 
upon the w^orld, is the comfort of Peguy the sinner. 
And he is always calling upon us to love God. 

Lovers of Milton and his virile language (and 
there are still some such in these days) will plunge 
with real delight into these writings of Peguy. The 
present pages are written with the aim of inviting 
them to do so. 

Again, in the Mystere de la Charite de Jeanne 
d^Arc and in Les Saints Innocents, we find once 
more the same doctrine of freedom, and the same 
conception of God, or rather of divine love. 

And in Eve, the idea of Christ coming to bring a 
new law, to superimpose the order of grace upon 
the order of nature, though without lowering the 



CHAELES PEGUY 235 

order of nature, the idea that creation had prepared 
salvation, — all that is worthy of Milton. 

But there is little good in a skeleton summary of 
these poems. 

Of course we must not exaggerate, and above all 
we must never lose sight of, Peguy's eminently prag- 
matic attitude, when he speaks with merry familiar- 
ity of God or his saints. 

We are a long way from Kant and his Categorical 
Imperative ! But on this point Peguy has expressed 
himself very clearly. ^^Le Kantisme a les mains 
pures, mais il n'a pas de mains. Et nous, nos 
mains calleuses, nos mains noueuses, nos mains 
pecheresses, nous avons quelquefois les mains 
pleines. . . .^'* 

Peguy gave free rein to all his intuitive lyricism 
in treating the extraordinary story of Jeanne d 'Arc, 
about whom men will never cease writing, and all 
the more so because he saw therein additional evi- 
dence in favor of Bergson's theory of intuition. 
Hanoteaux felt the same thing when he wrote his 
Jeanne d'Arc. Very wisely, Peguy has left the facts 
on one side, for a poem in its very definition cannot 
be the exposition of an historical inquiry ; above all, 
a poem which aims at being a meditation upon Chris- 
tian mysteries. And, like all religious writers, Peguy 
leaves a clear road for his critics. Obviously those 
who see only a series of irritating subtleties in Mil- 
ton's Paradise Lost would do better not to read 
such books. This brings us naturally to the study of 
Peguy as an artist. 

Peguy, as an artist, will always stand out from 
his contemporaries by reason of his style, which 
he wished to render as Bergsonian as possible. 

•Frangoia Marie, Comte Hugo, pp. 496-7. (Euvres computes, 
Tome IV. 



236 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

There are a great many readers who share Peguy's 
ideas, but detest his style, while there are others — 
a man like M. Paul Souday, for example — who de- 
clare the style to be peculiarly attractive.* 

Peguy himself knew perfectly well what he wanted 
to do, and he had his defense carefully written by 
his friend Lotte: 

*^Un lecteur dira: * Peguy a peut-etre beaucoup 
de genie mais il semble denue de talent. De grace 
priez-le done d'ecrire comme tout le monde et de 
rendre ainsi son oeuvre accessible. Je serais pour 
ma part fort desireux d'y penetrer. Encore fau- 
drait-il qu'il en degageat les avenues, au lieu de les 
barricader avec les ronces et les epines de son style 
herisse.* ''t 

Obviously the abundance of words, the repetitions, 
reiterations, discourage the reader ; and, to be frank, 
I fear that Peguy, who loved the people so well, will 
never be popular. It is true that the French peasant 
seizes upon a word and brings it into his talk over 
and over again, but he is not likely to love the man 
who imitates this habit. Peguy had certainly a won- 
derful mastery of his language (Jules Lemaitre 
spoke in his defense on this point in the Academy), 
he was very sure of his syntax, but he gave himself 
up too much to his game of leit-motif and da capo. 
His aim was to establish ^^the continuity of life in 
the discontinuity of Words,'' to express life **dans 
son ecoulement, ' ' to attain such fluidity that it would 
be impossible to cite the shortest sentence without 
being thereby obliged to quote a whole page or even 
several pages. It is true that he was successful in 
that, but perhaps he paid too dearly for what he con- 
sidered a great merit. 

*Paul Souday, Les Livres du Temps, p. 218. 
\ Joseph Lotte, p. 268. 



CHAELES PEGUY 237 

In order to make his reader absolutely at one 
with him, Peguy has recourse to a kind of flux of 
words, or continuous Bergsonian current of phrase, 
so that our vocables appear less stable, less material, 
less prosaic, and express his spiritual impulse, the 
fluidity and mobility of reality. 

Like every great conscious artist he feels that 
words are quasi-incapable of rendering great pas- 
sions. That is why he tries to express the ever flow- 
ing stream of life. Sometimes he plays with words 
like a cat 'with a mouse ; he leaves his idea, then goes 
back to it, tosses it into the air to catch it as it falls, 
and plays with it again. Those who read a book 
^^for the story," to see what happens, had better not 
open Peguy 's books or poems. They will find them 
dreadfully tiresome. A rather amusing point is that 
some of Peguy 's critics are speechless with admira- 
tion before Rabelais. Well, Peguy is another Rabe- 
lais in verbal invention, and is really far less intoxi- 
cated than Rabelais by the clatter of words. Rabe- 
lais when he '^gets going'' is like a child who shakes 
a policeman's rattle till the household is distracted. 
He has whole chapters which are nothing but a suc- 
cession of vocables. It would be vain to seek in 
Peguy those passages which abound in Rabelais and 
in which he lets loose a torrent of words, allitera- 
tions, assonances which become at last positively 

deafening. 

# * # * 

When men speak of Peguy they never forget that 
he fell on the field of battle, but they too often for- 
get that he was still young. True, his was a hero's 
death, but that is insuflicient consolation for his pre- 
mature end. When he fell, facing the enemy in 
1914, Peguy was far from having said his last word. 
When, under the direction of Bergson, he began to 



238 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

exploit the riches of his mind, and to give to his 
latent pessimism the broadening acquired by reli- 
gious thought, he knew very well what he was do- 
ing. Andre Snares likens him to **un frere pre- 
cheur, un petit capucin. ' ' That is good. Peguy the 
idealist was worthy to number among the first com- 
panions of Saint Francis of Assisi: for he was one 
of the great confessors of poverty, and for our mod- 
ern hedonic democracies there is no more necessary, 
salutary teaching. There was profound truth be- 
hind Andre Chenier's line: 

*^Qui ne sait etre pauvre est ne pour Pesclav- 
age." 

I may be wrong, but I seem to find above all in 
Peguy the same qualities which exist in the best 
men of his generation, in all those whose education 
was too dialectical and founded upon too many 
books, in writers as different from him as Andre 
Gide and Jules Romains — a strained desire for 
spontaneity, and a very deliberate love of lyricism; 
and then, right at the back of his mind, that other 
idea, that men are illogical beings and often need 

a Reformer. 

* * * # 

Any study of Peguy would be incomplete if no 
mention were made of the literary group among 
which he moved. M. Doumic has spoken of the very 
considerable influence exercised by Peguy. To tell 
the truth his influence is mixed up with that of Berg- 
son. It was exercised upon young schoolmen for 
whom **his words were half -battles ' * and to whom 
he taught respect of their own country and of the 
classics and the love of things spiritual. Here we 
have to deal with the imponderable. A literary 
clique creates for itself, and lives in, a certain atmos- 
phere, and the critic who has not lived in that atmos- 



CHAELES PEGUY 239 

phere can realize what it must have been only by 
looking through library catalogues, or hearing the 
talk of survivors. 

When we look through a complete collection of 
the CaJiiers de le Quinzaine (which, we may add for 
the benefit of the bibliophile, commands a very high 
price at the present day), we are struck first of all 
by the want of unity and direction in the young writ- 
ers who published in this way their first works — 
and very often masterpieces at that. 

For example, there is not the slightest resem- 
blance between the classic, or neo-classic, art of 
the brothers Tharaud or of Jean Schlumberger, and 
the romantic art of Eomain EoUand. The former 
follow in the tradition of the French analysts ; some- 
times they remind one of Benjamin Constant, and 
sometimes of Stendhal: they want above all to see 
realities, and for this end they accumulate small 
facts. A certain amount of bitter pessimism seems 
to them to be the condiment necessary to the swal- 
lowing of life. Eomain Eolland, on the contrary, 
offers us his Jean Christophe, a great clown of a 
German, a kind of clock ornament in the Eomantic 
fashion — hair ruffled by the wind, hurling defiance 
at the tempest. 

In the same way the criticism of Andre Snares 
with its fine shades of meaning, its depth too, has 
nothing in common with Peguy's criticism, which is 
much simpler, with its savor of hearth and pot and 
pan. Nor is there in the irony and realistic art of 
Emile Moselly anything faintly resembling the de- 
liberate moralization and tactful discrimination of 
Daniel Halevy. And it is equally obvious that many 
other contributors to the Cahiers are brought to- 
gether only by sharing the same political ideas. 

Their aims may be expressed in the exceedingly 



240 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

simple rule — so exceedingly liard to keep : above all 
be honest ! M. Frangois Porche, the poet, brought this 
out well in his very interesting, though rather too 
short, study of Pegiiy in the Mercure de France* 

One may also quote in this connection the power- 
ful words of Andre Suares in which he delivers a 
kind of funeral oration upon his own youth and 
that of his companions in arms: 

*^0n n^a jamais vecu pour Part avec plus d 'aban- 
don, plus de foi, ni plus de sincerite. Et certes, si 
tout se renouvelle en France d'ici a trente ans, et 
de la en Europe, c'est en nous qu'il faudra chercher 
Porigine de toute renovation et les premiers mod- 
eles de chaque nouveaute. Le poeme en prose, le 
vers libre, la poesie toujours prise de plus pres a 
la source musicale ; le roman tournant aux memoires 
ou au reve de la conscience; la musique infiniment 
etendue dans le plan de Pharmonie; la peinture et 
la statuaire qui tendent a un poeme logique de la 
couleur et des volumes: en tout nous avons trouve 
la sensation et le fragment, ou le document sec et 
Pimportune rhetorique; en tout nous avons voulu 
garder plus amoureusement le tresor de la nature et 
la regler par le style. Un ou deux meme se sont 
eleves jusqu'a la rever ainsi: rever la nature et lui 
donner le style. Part n'a rien de plus grand/' 

Andre Suares attributes to a single literary group 
what was really the work of several, but his attitude 
is very pardonable. Besides, what we are trying to 
find out here is whether there was not some pro- 
found connecting link animating all this ardent 
youth. Indeed, among all the remarkable works pub- 
lished in the Cahiers, there is one which is indeed 
the true reflection of the modern spirit, with all its 

*See in the Mercure de France, March 1, 1914, a very interesting 
article by M, Frangois Porche. 



CHAELES PEGUY 241 

subtlety and complexity, its preoccupation with the 
affective forces of the soul, and its respect of the 
inner life, and that is Albert Thierry's wonderful 
little book, VHomme en proie aux enfants* 
L^Homme en proie aux enfants is the young school- 
master who is intrusted with the care of young souls, 
and who is obliged to take a class of boys who have 
just reached * ^ the awkward age. ' ' This book, with its 
theory of life as a perpetual birth, is full of Berg- 
sonism, and ought to be in the hands of every school- 
teacher. It shows that in order to be a teacher wor- 
thy of the name, it is necessary first and foremost to 
realize that children are not machines, and that to 
understand them one must use sympathy, and again 
sympathy, and still more sympathy. Everyone 
should read his chapter called Silence. (Ch. 
XXIV.) 

After reading this wonderful Cahier, and the 
works of Peguy, the poems of Francois Porche, An- 
dre Spire, Bene Salome, and the novels of the 
brothers Tharaud, one realizes that for them litera- 
ture was, or was meant to be, the spontaneous 
outflow of a soul ; that reality for them was, or tried 
to be, a hold on immediate consciousness, that is, 
without the intermediary of logic. And it may well 
be that, without perhaps appearing to do so, Albert 
Thierry came nearest this ideal. Alas, that he too 
should have fallen in the World War! 

In any case all honor and glory to Bergson for 
having given its metaphysical justification to such 
an attitude, and to Peguy for having given a new 
significance to the words and sjonbols we use, for 
having shown, indeed, that *'the only way into na- 
ture is to enact our best insight. ' 'f 

*Troisi^m& Cahier de la onzieme serie, November 7, 1909., 
tEmerson. 



EMILE CLEEMONT 

MEMILE CLEEMONT, who fell on the 
battlefield at Maison-de-Champagne on 
• March 5th, 1916, was certainly the most 
highly gifted novelist of the young school. M. Eene 
Gillouin in a very interesting article in the Revue 
de Paris has told us how Clermont excelled in all 
subjects at the Lycee Henri IV, showing a special 
predilection for philosophy, which he studied first 
under Henri Bergson and later under Victor D'elbos. 
M. JRene Gillouin is himself one of the most remark- 
able of Bergson 's disciples and naturally lays stress 
upon Bergson 's teaching as being more than an 
illumination, rather an enfranchisement, a libera- 
tion, of Clermont 's mind. But even without this tes- 
timony from a co-disciple, to read Clermont *s novels 
is to realize the truth of M. Gillouin 's statement. 

It remains then to be seen to what extent Cler- 
mont was influenced by the Bergsonian philosophy, 
and in what measure his conception of art is attuned 
thereto. His output was unhappily all too short, 
since, if we except a historical study written when 
he was at the Ecole Normale Superieure, it consists 
of only three novels. But as these three novels 
treat the same themes, and show the same moral 
preoccupation, it is clear that Clermont's thought 
varied little. To put it briefly, these three novels 
might be looked upon as three chapters in the Wil- 
liam James manner on the Varieties of Eeligious 
Experience. 

242 



EMILE CLEEMONT 243 

The whole depth of Bergsonian philosophy 
is contained in his theory that reality cannot 
be enclosed in a formula. The first corollary 
of this theory is the idea that we may communicate 
with this reality without necessarily seeking to 
understand it; and the second corollary is the 
idea that ethical or aesthetic feelings are the best 
means of harmonizing with this same reality. In 
this way we are plunged into the uttermost depths 
of self wherein two feelings are perpetually present : 
egoism and altruism, those two primitive forces of 
the human mind. Altruism, more commonly called 
charity, is only another name for that deep-rooted 
instinct which is the religious instinct and which 
ever since man was created has manifested itself 
in so many different forms, but which in spite of 
all obstacles always manages to come to light. Taine 
used to tell us that '^we sleep and eat and seek to 
make a little money or gain a certain amount of 
men^s esteem; and our way of life is simply petty 
when it is not animal. ' ' But when Taine wrote like 
this he saw things only from the outside, he simply 
did not care about discovering the powerful forces 
of the mind, the religious forces, — such as Puritan- 
ism, for example, — which have played so important 
a part in the history of nations. 

When one looks back upon the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury it seems to be the history of efforts to create 
a new religion or restore the old one. That is 
its pathos. In reality no one can understand 
Clermont's attitude of mind who has not also 
read the work of other young writers of his day. 
'^Agathon's^' book, les Jeunes Gens d'aujourd'hui, 
shows us a whole generation of lovers of ethics 
and action, who seek in the religion most gen- 
erally professed in their country, that is to say in 



244 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITEES 

Catholicism, not so much a body of metaphysical 
doctrines all more or less subject to theological 
dispute, but rather a kind of decalogue such 
as is alone capable of endowing social life with 
strength, health and happiness. Together with this 
book of Agathon's which is so full of information 
upon the mentality of the young Frenchmen of pre- 
war days, should be read Romain Rolland's^a^oi*- 
velle Journee. There you have two authors who 
differ widely in religious thought, but who describe 
the same tendencies in a generation which might 
be called pragmatico-bergsonian, to coin a not very 
neat phrase, a generation which loved health, sport 
and physical contests yet at the same time realized 
that sentiment had its importance too. Georges 
Jeannin, the young man studied by Romain Rolland, 
is tired **of Tolstoi's nihilistic pity, of Ibsen's som- 
ber distinctive pride, of Nietzsche's frenzy and of 
Wagner's heroic, sensual pessimism." So are 
*'Agathon's" correspondents. There is not a 
shadow of doubt that the state of mind of these 
young men was in part produced by Grermany's atti- 
tude towards France from 1887 to 1914. But there is 
another, deeper cause which explains their mental- 
ity, their utilitarian mysticism, their rational ethics, 
and we see it working in America and also in Eng- 
land — I mean their lassitude, not of reason, as 
Romain Rolland believes, but of that reasoning kind 
of reason which creates numberless philosophical 
systems, but leads to nothing. This skepticism on 
the subject of Truth with a capital T has never 
been better expressed than by Professor Schiller, in 
a page written since the outbreak of the "World War, 
and which renders admirably the feelings in the 
heart of hearts of a host of young Frenchmen: 



EMILE CLEEMONT 245 

*'If only philosophers could be got to face the 
facts of actual life, could any of them fail to observe 
the enormous object-lesson in the truth of prag- 
matism which the world has been exhibiting in the 
present crisis? Everywhere the Hruths' believed 
in are relative to the nationality and sympathies of 
their believers. It is, indeed, lamentable that such 
an orgy of the will to believe should have been 
needed to illustrate the pragmatic nature of truth, 
but who will dispute that for months say 999 per- 
sons out of 1,000 have been believing what they 
please, and consciously or unconsciously making it 
*true' with a fervor rarely bestowed even by the 
most ardent philosophers on the most self-evident 
truths ? No improbability, no absurdity, no atrocity, 
has been too great to win credence and the uniform- 
ity of human nature has been signally attested by 
the way in which the same stories (mutatis mutan- 
dis) have been credited on both sides/'* 

Young Frenchmen had not waited for the war of 
1914, any more than Professor Schiller had, to be- 
come hmnanists, — humanists, that is, in practice 
after the French fashion, — neo-classicists, or sim- 
ply ardent patriots. A great country, which has 
deserved so well of humanity as France, has every 
right to a life and development according to her 
own genius. Even though she appears to waste her 
strength in seemingly futile efforts, even if she 
makes mistakes in her endeavors to find a faith, it 
is not for the skeptic in his study to criticize. 

Emile Clermont stands out among the group of 
remarkable young men by the fact that he seems 
still more strongly imbued with that Bergsonian 
doctrine which made Peguy^s friend, Josephe Lotte, 

*Mind. Year 1915. Realism, Pragmatism, William Ja/mes. 1915. 



246 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

say: **Je n'oublierai jamais Pemotion dont me 
transporta V Evolution creatrice. Jy sentais Dieu a 
chaque page.'' 

Now bring this philosophy into contact with a 
naturally highly strung temperament, a deeply cul- 
tured mind fresh from all the best French authors 
of the Nineteenth Century, and see what lessons this 
young writer will have retained. He finds himself 
faced with the two hostile forces which are neces- 
sarily maintained by Bergson's doctrine, since the 
one is engendered by the other, — on the one hand 
our self, with its cortege of more or less conscious 
mystic phenomena ; on the other, a spirit of analysis 
and self-examination (what the French call dedou- 
hlement) which brings into play the forces of in- 
tellect. It cannot be denied that a part of Berg- 
son's doctrine exalts the importance of feeling — 
but a century ago Eousseau and the Eomantics gave 
*^ sensibility" the predominant place over reason. 
Eomanticism is at bottom a mystic movement; 
and its mystic fervor a good dose of quinine for 
those whom the cult of Eeason had rendered 
anaemic. ^'We were drunken mth poetry," said 
Gerard de Nerval — *^with mysticism" would have 
been more accurate. And this European movement 
is the same everywhere : Wagner, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, 
Ibsen, are all descendants of Eousseau, whether they 
acknowledge it or no. 

But in France, the land of men who always want 
to see things clearly, the struggle between the intel- 
lect, always busy in plucking out of duration mo- 
ments that interest us, and intuition, leading us 
always to the very inwardness of life, created a 
state of mind which, as it developed, turned against 
itself and exaggerated itself still further. Thus 
was hypertrophied that faculty for dividing one's 



EMILE CLEEMONT 247 

personality into two halves of wMcli the one 
watches the other act, that spirit of morbid analysis 
of which Benjamin Constant's AdolpJie^ is the type, 
but which type is repeated in all the psychological 
novels of the Nineteenth Century, in StendhaPs 
masterpieces, in Baudelaire's prose poems, and in 
certain of Bourget's and Barres' writings. All that 
part of Bergson's doctrine relating to the becoming 
is meaningless to the intellect. It does not experi- 
ence anything like the sensations described by M. 
Le Eoy in his study of Bergsonian philosophy; **Ne 
vous est-il pas arrive parfois, entraines a travers 
mille detours dans une course imprudente d'une 
extreme vitesse, de vous abandonner sans pre- 
vision au charme etrange du changement, a Pivresse 
delicieuse du devenir? Et n'avez-vous pas alors 
observe que vous perdiez le sentiment ordinaire de 
Pecoulement regulier du temps pour ne ressentir 
qu'une vive impression de rythme et qu'une emotion 
d'attente sans cesse renouveleeT' Clearly, the 
description of such sensations can make no appeal 
to the novelist, whose tendency is to follow the 
cinematographical method, and whose logical efforts 
are, in his eyes, the most positive of all his spiritual 
efforts. 

The novelist is ruled in the first place by the com- 
plex and subtle laws of his own sensibility, then by 
those no less subtle of the art he practises. The 
analytic method is forced upon him by his very 
intellectualism, which gives him a wonderful deli- 
cacy of touch in dealing with the niceties of con- 
science and all the twistings and turnings of our 
moral being. When he is a great artist, he gives 
himself up to his own innumerable emotions and 

*The reader may consult with profit Professor Rudler's: la Jeu- 
nesse de Benjamin Constant." 



248 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

through them he unveils to us the mysterious work- 
ing of a human soul. 

Then he is forced by the laws of his art to describe 
life and set human beings in motion more or less 
more geometrico. He must needs have a method, 
according to which facts and feelings will be dock- 
eted and pigeon-holed. He feeds on logic and *^fine 
language.'' But very soon he realizes that all the 
living, moving, throbbing side of humanity escapes 
him, that he is like a child trying to hold water in 
his hand, that his so-called method is an arbitrary 
one and his labels too often imaginary, and finally 
that mere words cannot keep pace with thought. 
If he can meditate on states of consciousness, he 
cannot meditate on his own meditation. He can only 
describe his actions when they are accomplished; 
but when he lives them, his one resource is silence. 

Emile Clermont found a device to satisfy both 
his need for analysis and his fidelity to the Berg- 
sonian doctrine, by studying what Bergson himself 
calls ^^the ultimate reason of human life''; and in 
this way he also satisfied the innermost cravings 
of his own heart and of his contemporaries. 

Emile Clermont's three books. Amour promis, 
Laure, and VHistoire d' Isahelle, are all works of 
intense spirituality. His heroines are those middle 
class French girls, who have what M. de Pomairols 
calls *'la faculte de voir mentalement 1 'invisible et 
de percevoir la presence du surnaturel. ' ' They have 
a kind of sixth sense which authoritatively declares 
to them the existence of the beyond. 

With Laure and Isabelle we are a long way from 
Diderot's Religieuse! Indeed such heroines have 
that very faculty of meditation and introspection 
so distasteful to many of our women of to-day ; they 



EMILE CLEEMONT 249 

are even incomprehensible to the mind of a world 
which has lost the habit of thinking for itself. 

Emile Clermont's first novel, Amour Promts, will 
take its place with Rene, and Adolphe and Volupte 
and Dominique. It should be read with the works 
of a talented young writer, who died in 1909, when he 
was hardly twenty-five years old, Charles Demange. 
M. Demxange was a nephew of Maurice Barres, and 
the uncle's influence is perceptible on every page of 
le Livre du Desir. He was still trying to find a way 
out of the terrible Nihilism in which he was strug- 
gling when he died. Dilettantism is a dangerous 
thing in a human being who, after dabbling in vari- 
ous forms of civilization, goes on to demand of life 
and love impressions with which neither life nor love 
can furnish him, but it is a still more dangerous thing 
in the exaggerated temperament of an artist who 
attempts to build the world anew with the materials 
discovered by a distorted vision. The angel with 
whom Jacob wrestled was probably called Dis- 
cipline. Amour Promis is a far truer book than 
Bourget's Disciple. Bourget wanted to make his 
philosopher Adrien Sixte responsible for the crime 
committed by his pupil Eobert Greslon, while really 
the poor old determinist philosopher is no more 
responsible than Spinoza for the low instincts of an 
ill-bred young man. Emile Clermont shows us the 
psychological drama played in the inner mind of a 
young dilettante. No sooner has Andre won Helene 
than he is seized with disgust. But his is not merely 
the despair of a moral being who in a moment of 
forgetfulness betrays the trust of the girl who loves 
him; it is also the despair of the voluptuary who 
sees that his fleeting pleasure has not made him 
master of the soul, nor of the love, nor of the beauty, 



250 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITEES 

of Ms mistress; it is the despair of the egoist who 
realizes that his soul can never know any other land 
than the melancholy deserts of egoism; it is the 
despair of the litterateur tired of his own thoughts 
and his own actions and who then declares that all 
is Vanity. "Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre 
delicat!'' said Baudelaire of Ennui, 

Laure, Clermont's second book, is an eminently 
spiritual drama foreshadowed in certain pages of 
Amour Promis, It is the story of a girl, Laure, 
who is preoccupied by the great moral and religious 
questions. She believes herself to be loved by a 
young man who is paying her attention and gives 
herself up to this tender feeling. But when her 
sister Louise appears upon the scene the young man 
transfers his attention from Laure to Louise. Not 
a very complicated story, and the writer's art 
consists in showing us Laure 's evolution, how she 
rises through sorrow to purest renunciation. She 
goes into a convent, leaves it after some years and 
devotes herself to charitable work. She comes home 
to her sister to rest, but her very presence upsets 
the peace of the household, so that she is obliged 
to return to her life of good works, though still 
anxious and henceforward disillusioned. 

There are very many pages in this book which 
sound the Bergsonian note: for example, the influ- 
ence of the part of the world in which the scene is 
laid and which has left its mark upon the minds 
of those who live there (p. 3)*^ the difference in the 

*For it must not be forgotten that Bergson is or has been a pure 
nominalist. According to him the faculty of thought is merged into 
the faculty of imagination, which amounts to saying that our mind 
is merely a series of memories and imaginations, desires and 
fulfilments (for a long time M. Bergson did not admit the existaice 
oi any substance in the background, though he now accepts ^he 
immortality of the soul) ; his theory was fundamentally the same 
as that of the sensualists and Taine. 



EMILE CLEEMONT 251 

character of the two sisters, and the conception of 
Laure's character as a soul in whom the spiritual 
aspirations have burst into spontaneous bloom like 
some unknown flower almost without any assistance 
or revelation from outside, and have freely 
developed (pp. 21-22), and also in the very defini- 
tion of her mind which was ill at ease in the exact 
sciences, but which moved freely in the domain of 
delicate sentiments and ethical values. 

There is something of Madame B ovary in Laure, 
as in all of us ; Madame B ovary dreamed of a vague 
and wonderful universe. In truth, the failure to 
make life equal to our dreams (that failure which 
made torment of Baudelaire's existence*) is the sub- 
ject of all Flaubert's books,t and of Clermont's 
novels: it is the great 19th century theme, and 
rightly so. 

In Laure the descriptions of landscape are as 
important as those in Madame Bovary, for Clermont 
Bees in landscape a means of showing us the work- 
ings of his heroine's temperament, and in this way 
of illuminating the interior world by means of the 
external world. That is why he has given us that 
admirable scene on a summer's night, ^4orsque'a 
la voute du ciel s 'eploie la clarte de la lune et qu 'on 
entrevoit par dela cette nappe de lumiere des abimes 
bleus avec une douceur particuliere des etoiles," 
when Laure talks with Marc of the landscape as of 
intimate objects which affect her personally, bring- 
ing with them the vision of the Infinite (p. 79 et 
seq.). In the same way when Laure, having realized 

*Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux 
D'un siecle sans espoir nait un siecle sans crainte; 
Les cometes du notre ont depeuple les cieux. 

tM. Louis Bertrand in his most interesting book on Flaubert 
endows Flaubert with a conception of life very like Bergson's. But 
8uh judice lis est. 



252 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITERS 

that Marc loves her sister, resolves to bring the 
two together and to give np her own dream of 
happiness, Clermont puts her in a landscape which 
is a fit setting for renunciation, and makes her 
distribute her jewelry to a band of beggars at a 
monastery gate. Again, when Laure comes back 
from the convent, and the past, which has lain 
buried for so many years, reappears between the 
two sisters, the scenes of analysis, subtle as they 
are, are laid in the open air, and the actors call to 
witness now the clear azure sky and the peace of 
evening as it descends upon this sunlit corner 
(p. 301), now the scenery of the banks of the river 
they know so well (p. 303). Nature is closely 
linked with human feelings and accompanies them 
as an obligato throughout the book, but the drama 
is made by human feelings. It is Laure 's conflict 
with love which sends her into the path of spiritual 
life, first making her sympathize with all suffering 
and thereby leading her to a comprehension of the 
Man of Sorrows. Clermont in all these pages is 
merely describing those states of mind well known 
to mystics, when the soul in its desperate need utters 
a cry which it cannot afterwards repeat and realizes 
that it has loved sorrow too well. 

The different states of Laurels soul which, in its 
passion for the ideal and the Beyond, could not suit 
itself to ordinary life, nor to convent life, show 
that she considered the religious life as being 
eminently an inner experience of an overweening 
individualism. Here Clermont is on that solid 
ground wherein the founders of all religious orders 
have always stood, restraining by severe discipline 
the impulses of a mystic soul. So that Laurels 
mysticism is merely the sign of a desire to ally with 
God the proud ambition of expanding her own 



EMILE CLEEMONT 253 

being, by taking up tbe religious life. The same 
desire and the same pride are to be found in every 
artistic temperament. When Marc, the husband of 
Laure's sister, says to Laure, ^^Pour ceux qui n'ont 
qu'une vie simple et commune cela seul est deja une 
grande chose de savoir que vous existez," it is 
Clermont's final view he is expressing. 

Emile Clermont has left us a third book, Histoire 
d'Isahelle which has appeared in fragments in the 
Revue de Paris in 1912 under the separate titles 
Un petit Monde, and le Eecit d'Isahelle, but the 
two tales were really only one. The author's pre- 
mature death prevented him from leaving things 
in his ideal state of achievement. The publisher, 
in the note at the beginning of the book, tells us that 
this novel was meant to be one of a series of several, 
in which, as in Balzac's Human Comedy, the same 
characters would be met with again, each in his turn 
in the foreground. In V Histoire d'Isabelle, as we 
now have it, we see under different names the same 
souls we already know. Genevieve Arlet in Un petit 
Monde goes into a convent just as Laure does, but 
Genevieve does it to expiate the sin of her brother, 
who has seduced and finally abandoned a young 
girl, and also to expiate universal evil. This last 
idea was never so much in fashion (for it is a verit- 
able fashion) as at the end of the Nineteenth 
Century. Formerly if anyone went into a convent 
it was for her own salvation.* But the grand idea 
of the Communion of Saints had great hold over 
Clermont, and one may remark in passing that this 

*"The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid little heed to 
social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil whilst 
savings one's own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme." 
— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 354. 

This point is well brought out by M. Strowski in his Tableau de 
la literature fran^aise au dix neuvihms si^cle. 



254 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

idea of the union of the dead with the living is fully 
in harmony with Bergsonian philosophy. If life is 
the pursuit of happiness, whatever form it may take, 
Emile Clermont has always conceived happiness as 
an ideal aspiration. In this he is a Romantic and 
a Christian too. 

He would have made of the French novel a kind 
of Lives of the Saints, not for the edification, but 
for the instruction, of all those who are interested in 
problems of mysticism as manifestations of human 
activity in its most extraordinary, and at the same 
time most efficacious, actions. The idea of God 
directing humanity lies behind all Clermont's nov- 
els just as it lies behind Bergson's philosophy. The 
writer- and thinker-side of Clermont sought an 
ethical equilibrium which always eluded him, as is 
shown by the end of Laure; the moralist in him 
sought the realization of God, as was proved once 
more by the books and papers he was studying just 
before his death. 

And now if we turn to the book just published 
by Mademoiselle Louise Clermont in memory of her 
brother, in which she gives the public some of the 
papers left by the young soldier, we realize still 
better that here was a writer who from his early 
youth had felt intellectual passion ^4ike the pressure 
outward of wings froni, within. ' ' He seemed born 
to have that knowledge of things from within ^^that 
can grasp facts in their springing forth instead of 
taking them already sprung'' (Bergson), one of 
those souls who hunger for the Absolute. Nature 
for him is but a symbol of his inner life. His great- 
est love, one of his friends tells us, was for springs, 
running waters, because he could see in this bright, 
crystalline element the purity, changeful light, and 
endless flow of his own consciousness. He reminds 



EMILE CLEEMONT 255 

us at times of Eichard Feverel, who felt ** those 
wand-like touches of I know not what, before which 
our grosser being melts, and we, much as we hope 
to be in the Awaking, stand etherealized, trembling 
with new joy.'' 

But at the same time this young normalien is the 
product of a very old and very subtle civilization: 
analytic and sensual too. It would be Well if our 
sensuous intuitions really were, as Bergson claims, 
in continuity with our supra-intellectual intuitions. 
Clermont reveals to us the secret drama of a soul 
who feels and realizes that knowledge is not en- 
tirely resolvable into terms of intelligence, and yet 
has not always the strength to establish himself in 
the extra-intellectual matter of knowledge by a 
higher effort of intuition. And here we must pause 
and ask ourselves, Was he likely to succeed? Our 
mind is the product of cosmic evolution, but will the 
Vital Impetus ever be able to make us change all 
its constitutive elemental parts? 

When M. Bergson bids us turn homeward and 
strive to gain contact with the living principle 
whence we emanate, do we not feel — in the very 
effort we are making to be in communion with the 
flux of matter, with the sleepy life of the plants or 
of the infusoria, with the unconscious knowledge of 
the new-born babe, with the consciousness of men — 
the Divine will always in need of creation, do we not 
feel that we go against the grain of our intellect? 

And now picture a young man wanting to live 
a spiritual life amid the thousand and one emo- 
tions and sensations of Parisian life : is the intensive 
culture gained by his education calculated to set 
him on his real way? On the contrary, when hu- 
man mind is thus dispersed amid swarming troops 
of dishevelled ideas, it is far less likely to have those 



256 SOME MODERN FEENCH WRITERS 

wonderful intuitions, when we see into the life of 
things-- 

^ ^ . . with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony and the deep power of joy.'^ 

Numerous are the pages where we find utterances 
of a mind ill at ease with itself — where we can see 
Rene, AdolpJie, or Volupte warring with Creative 
Evolution. Such pages help us to understand why 
Bergson has been variously understood by the ma- 
jority of Frenchmen and the majority of Anglo- 
Saxons. For the latter he is the creator of some 
fine sayings which reveal — by the vistas they open 
or by their depth of sound — the vast, unseen, mag- 
nificent future of our becoming. ^ ^ The gates of the 
future are wide open,'' is a phrase rich in sugges- 
tion to men who want to re-create the universe ac- 
cording to their needs and will, and who, far from 
thinking that the universe is wound up once for all, 
would fain make new keys, new lever, new pulleys, 
to lift it onwards. 

Frenchmen — or rather, Parisians, either because 
the romantic malady has strained their intellect, or 
because they are, on the contrary, robust and react 
against all that savors of indulgence in ^'sensibil- 
ity'' — can see in Bergson only the apostle of a cer- 
tain morbidity, a moral sexlessness, or the supporter 
of a dolce far niente, mother of all vices. 

In the same way, the reader of these fragments 
published by Mademoiselle Clermont will see that 
too often Clermont read his Bergson through his 
favorite analytical authors. He even went so far 
as saying that Sainte-Beuve's Volupte gave him the 
best idea of the Bergsonian Time — viz., of a volup- 
tuous state of the soul, with innumerable sensations 
following one another closely, and, if so, of a being 



EMILE CLEEMONT 257 

neutralized by the play of circumstances and off- 
spring of Chance. 

It would be unfair to Clermont to say that the 
adulterated atmosphere of Parisian life assimilated 
him entirely to itself : here and there he has flashes 
of intuitive truth, recurring moments in which he 
acknowledges that Bergs on is a real master. 

And it is the contact of his thoughts with those 
of Bergson, as well as his intense susceptibility, the 
bold feeling of a spirit of life in outward things, 
which constitutes the attraction of some of the pages 
of this young writer and give to his all-too-short 
work a unity of lyrical effect. 

In this way Clermont stands at the head of a whole 
group of French novelists. The best known among 
them in England is probably Ernest Psichari, the 
grandson of Eenan, who was killed in action near 
Neufchateau, at the end of August, 1914. His Voy- 
age du Centurion was translated into English in 
1917, and the wide interest it excited is in itself 
significant of modern taste. It is the story of a 
young French officer who leads his native troops 
through the Sahara and finds faith for himself in 
the desert. The French edition of the book gained 
the honor of a Preface by Paul Bourget, to which 
there would be nothing to add if M. Bourget had 
really shown that Psichari 's ancestral beliefs had 
been reawakened by reaction against Mussulman 
faith. If Psichari turns to Eome, **la plus forte 
organisation de PInconnu,'' like Charles Demange, 
it is for other reasons. 

Such literature is not composed of sleep and sloth; 
as certain critics have assured us. Psichari was 
overflowing with energy and knew by experience that 
the hero would make the event his obedient servant. 



258 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

Another writer with mystical tendencies, though 
not of the same group, who is less well known in 
England, but a far more powerful writer than 
Psichari, is Charles Louis Philippe. He has been 
compared with Dickens and with Dosto'ievski, on ac- 
count of his sympathy with the sufferings of those 
unfortunate and apparently unimportant small souls 
who fall into baseness, one hardly knows why. 
Bubu de Montparnasse, le Pere Perdrix, Marie 
Donadie'U, Croqiiignole, Charles Blanchard, are the 
works in which he develops to the utmost this Eus- 
sian feeling. But the striking thing about him, and 
the trait which links him with Clermont, is his in- 
tense care for moral life. 

The books of Frangois Mauriac {U Enfant charge 
de Chaines), Eobert Vallery Eadot {VHomme du 
Desir), Jean Variot {les Hasards de la Guerre), 
above all those of M. Andre Beaunier {I'Homme qui 
a perdu son moi)y most of those of M. Andre Gide 
(la Porte etroite, rimmoraliste, les Caves du Vati- 
can) and the writings of M. Andre Snares, treat in 
their turn the same problems, dressing in the fash- 
ion of to-day the questions which Pascal, Tolstoi or 
Nietzsche racked their brains to solve. 

Pascal encouraged no one to sound the depths of 
the Copernican theory, and Tolstoi echoed him when 
he rallied those who busied themselves with such 
questions as the origin of species. But those who 
know, as William James puts it so well, that our 
moral and practical attitude at any given time is 
always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, — 
impulses pushing us one way, and obstructions and 
inhibitions holding us back, — believe that the strug- 
gle will always continue with varying fortune, and 
victory now on one side and now on the other. 

The charm, and at the same time the value, of 



EMILE CLEEMONT 259 

writers such as Snares or Andre Gide lies in the 
fundamental sincerity with which they study the 
eternal problems which have never ceased to agi- 
tate humanity, and at the same time in the taste 
and moderation which characterize their truly 
French productions. 

It is obvious that the ideas accepted between 1850- 
1880 by men of letters and science upon the na- 
ture of reason, the influence of a certain kind of 
science and on the insignificance of our sentimental 
life, are no longer current. Bergson, Barres, as 
well as Snares or Gide, may sometimes seem to be 
carried away too far by the reaction against their 
predecessors ' work. But their work is never in bad 
taste. We can smile to-day at the ultra-positive, 
ultra-Gradgrinding spirits who flattered themselves 
they had discovered the real agents of the universe 
by a diligent study of astronomy, or of the microbes 
disclosed by a microscope, for, after all, facts will 
never be anything more than the results of analysis 
made by the human mind, of abstractions into which 
the abstractor is forced to put a good deal of him- 
self. It is the eternal story of the grocer who 
weights his scales to his own advantage. In any 
case, science will always be science, — that is to say, 
an essential condition of human progress. 

From time to time, then, Bergsonism, in its own 
efforts to catch the elusive source of life, came very 
near to a German kind of pantheism which makes of 
the human soul a very tiny thing quivering in the 
claws of deified nature. But it soon corrected it- 
self, because it had been brought up in the tradi- 
tions of a race possessing to the highest degree the 
taste for the precise and the definite. 

Then came the great war, wreaking irreparable 
havoc as it mowed down so many brilliant song- 



260 SOME MODERN FEENCH WEITEES 

writers. Yet the war will have served to show us, 
even if we admitted, with the pure intellectual, that 
action or thought are due only to an automatism 
acquired by centuries of adaptation or of education, 
that strength of soul and delicacy of heart, ardent 
force of patriotism, rapid intuitions of a Being 
which is superior to the world, heroic acts of sacri- 
fice, are the most perfect product of our civilization ; 
and, since this is so, even the intellectuals will realize 
their importance and counsel their cultivation with 
most jealous care. 



CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THOUGHT 

WOBKS OP BEFEBENOB 

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Brochard, V, Etudes de philosophie ancienne et 

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Brunschvicg^ Leon. Les Etapes de la pMlosopMe 

mathematique. Paris, 1912. Introduction a la 

vie de Pesprit. Paris, 1900. La Moralite du 

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Berth, Edouard. La Politique anticlericale et le 

socialisme. (Cahiers de la quinzaine, ser. IV, 

No. 11.) 1903. Les Mefaits des Intellectuels. 

(Preface de Georges Sorel.) 1914. Dialogues 

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Cresson, Andre. Le Malaise de la Pensee Philo- 

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Durkheim, Emile. Director of PAnnee Socio- 

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2nd ed. Paris, 1902. Les Formes elementaires 

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nature (epuise). 
Delhos, Victor. Figures et doctrines de philoso- 

261 



262 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

plies, Socrate, Lucrece, Marc Aurele, Descartes, 

Spinoza, Kant, Maine de Biran. Paris, 1918. 

Le Spinozisme. Paris, 1916. L 'esprit philoso- 

phique de PAllemagne et la Pensee fran^aise. 

No. 40 of Pages actuelles. Paris, 1915. 
Eamelin, Octave. Le Systeme de Descartes. Paris, 

1911. 
Lasserre, Pierre. Le Romantisme frangais. Paris, 

1907. La Doctrine officielle de PUniversite. 

Paris, 1912. La Morale de Nietzsche. Paris, 

1902. 
Le Bon, Gustave. Les opinions et les Croyances. 

Paris, 1911. La Vie des Verites. Paris, 1914. 

Psychologie du Socialisme. 1899. 
Pillon, F. La PMlosopliie de Charles Secretan. 

1898. 
Penjon, A. Etude sur la vie et les oeuvres philoso- 

phiques de G. Berkeley, Eveque de Cloyne. 

Paris, 1878. 
Milhaud, Gaston. Essai sur les conditions et les 

limites de la certitude logique. 2nd ed., 1898. 
Sorel, Georges. De PEglise et de PEtat. 1901. 

(Cahiers de la Quinzaine, ser. Ill, No. 3.) Les 

Illusions du Progres. 1911. (Etudes sur le 

devenir social.) Le Systeme historique de 

Renan. 1905-1906. 
Sangnier, Marc. L 'Esprit Democratique. 7th ed., 

1906. La Lutte pour la Democratic. 1908, 2nd 

ed. La Jeune Republique. 2 vols. 1913. 
Tarde, J. G. Underground Man (Fragment d'his- 

toire future) — trans, by Cloudesley Brereton 

— Preface, H. Gr. Wells. Pages choisies par ses 

fils. Introduction par H. Bergson. 1910. 
Schiller, Professor F. C. S. Humanism. 2nd ed., 

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problem. 1912. Riddles of the Sphinx. 2nd 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 263 

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Philosophie Nouvelle. Henri Bergson. 1912. 
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Fullerton, W. M. French Idealism and the War. 

(Quarterly Eev.) Oct., 1915. 
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HENRI BEEGSON 

WOKKS OF EEFEKENCE 

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Henri Bergson. 1910. 
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264 



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Kallen, H. M. K, William James and Henri Berg- 
son. 1914. 

Kitchen, D, B, Bergson for Beginners. 1914. 

Le Roy, E, Une philos. nouvelle. 1913. 

Lindsay, A, D, The Philos. of Bergson. 1911. 

Maritain, J, La philosophie bergsonienne. 1914. 

Miller, L. H. Bergson and Religion. 1916. 

Peguy, Charles. Note sur M. Bergson. 1914. 

Penido, M, T, L. La Methode Lituitive de M. Berg- 
son. 1918. 

Olgiati. La filosofia di Bergson. 1914. 

Osty, E. Lucidite et Intuition. 1914. 

Rageot, G. Les Savants et la Philosophie. 1908. 

Ribot, Th, Essai sur Pimagination creatrice. 1914. 

Ruhe, A., and Paul, N, M. Henri Bergson. 1914. 

Russell Bertrand. The Philos. of Bergson. 1914. 

Solomon, Joseph. Bergson. 1912. 

Stewart, J. M. A Critical Exposition of Bergson *s 
Philosophy. 1914. 

Tonquedec, de J. La notion de la verite dans la 
Philos. nouvelle. 1908. Dieu dans PEvolution 
creatrice avec deux lettres de M. Bergson. 
1912. 

Wilbois, J. Devoir et duree. 1912. 

Wundt, W. Die Nationeu und ihre Philosophie. 
1916. 

Aimel, G. Individualisme et Phil, bergsonienne. 

(Reo. de Philosophie. June, 1908.) 
Alexander, H. B. Socratic Bergson. (Mid West 

Quarterly. New York, Oct., 1913.) 



266 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITEES 

Altmann, B. Bergson's Welterfolg. (Die Aehre. 

1914-15.) 
Antal, I. Jahrbuch der Scliopenhauer-Gesellscliaft. 

1914. 
Antonelli, E. Bergson et le mouvement Social con- 

temporain. (Wissen and Leben. 1912.) 
Armstrong, Bergson, Berkeley and Philosophical 

Intuition. (Philosophical Rev. 1914. 4.) 
Babbit, J. Bergson et Rousseau. (Rev. Polit. et 

Litter. Rev. Bleue II. 1912.) 
Baeumker, CL Bergson 's Philosophie. Phil. Jb. d. 

Gorres-Ges. Vol. 25. 1912. Anschanuung und 

Denken. 1913. 
Balsillie, D. Bergson: on Time and Free Will. 

Mind, Vol. 20. 1911. An Examination of Berg- 
son's Philosophy. 1912. 
Barr, C. The Dualism of Bergson. Phil. Rev., 

XXII. 1914. 
Bazaillas, A. La vie personnelle. 1915. Musique 

et Inconscience. 1908. Bergson (Renaissance 

21 Feb.). 1914. 
Beaumier, A. Nouveaux Acadamiciens. (Figaro 

13 feb.) 1914. 
Belot. Un nouveau spiritualisme. (Rev. philos. 

Vol. 44.) 1897. 
Benda, J, Reponse aux defenseurs du Bergsonisme. 

(Mercure de France. Vol. 104.) 1913. Une 

meprise sur Pintuition bergsonienne. (Rev. du 

mois. May.) 1912. 
Bennett, C. A, Bergson 's Doctrine of Intuition. 

(Phil. Rev. Jan.) 1916. 
Benrubi, I. Henri Bergson. (Zukunft. Vol. 71.) 

1910. 
Bernhard, E. Bergson 's Lebensgriif und die 

moderne Umschau. (Tat. 4.) 1912. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 267 

Berrod, P. La philos. de Pintuition. (Rev. phil. 

T. 74.) 1912. 
Beyer, P. Bergson's Riickkelir zum wildentum. 

Tiirmer 107. 1914. 
Biach, R. Bergson's Entwicklungstheorie. (Kos- 

mos. 49.) 1914. 
Biegeleisen, B. Der Einfluss von H. Bergson's Phi- 

losopMe auf die franzosische Literatur. Sphinx. 

1912. 
BlachlochfW. Bergson 's Creative Evolution. West- 
minster Rev. Vol. 177. 1912. 
Bonhoff, K. Aus Bergson's Hamptwerke. (Prote- 
stant. Monatshefte.) 1913. 
Bonifas, H, Catholicisme et Bergsonisme. (Foi et 

Victoire 16 Nov.) 1914. 
Bonus, A, Bergson muss es wissen Marz. 5 Sept. 

1914. 
Botte, L. Bergson e messo all Indice. (Rasseg. 

Nazionale. Vol. 198.) 1914. 
Bouche, J. La philos. de Bergson. (Questions 

Eccles. Feb.) 1913. 
Bourdeau, J. Esmetique de Bergson. ( Journ. des 

Debats. 24 feb.) 1914. 
{Brockdorff, C. von. Die Wahrbeit uber Bergson. 

1916.) 
Buraud, G, L'origine scolastique de la theorie de 

la perception exterieure de Bergson. (Entre- 

tiens Israelites I.) 1914. 
Bush, W. T, Bergson Lectures. (Col. Univ. Quar- 
terly. Vol. 15.) 1913. 
Columbia Univ. Press. Contrib. to Bibliog. of 

Bergson. 1912. 
Corrance. Bergson's philosophy and the idea of 

God. (Hibbert Journal. Vol. XII. 2.) 1914. 
Cory, C. B. Bergson's Intellect and Matter. (Phil. 

Rev. Vol. XXII. 5.) 1914. 



268 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

Cantecor, G. La pMlos. nouvelle et la vie de Pes- 

prit. (Rev. PhH. T. 55.) 1903. 
Carr, H. Wildon, Bergson's Theory of Knowledge. 

{Proc. Arist Soc, IX.) 1909. The Philos. of 

Bergson. (Hihhert Journ. VIII. July.) 1910. 

Time & History in Contemp. Philos. (Proc. 

Brit. Acad. Vol. VIII.) 1918. What does 

Bergson mean by Pure Perception? {Mind, 

July.) 1918. 
Calcagno, A. Bergson et la cultura contemporanea. 

(Rev. d^filos. Vol. IV.) 1913. 
Calkins, M, W, Bergson Personalist. (Phil. Rev. 

Vol. XXI. No. 6.) 1912. 
Cams, The Anti-Intellectual of Today. (Monist. 

Vol. XXII. No. 3.) 1913. 
Catta, A propos d'une refutation de Bergson. 

(Univers. 19 Nov.) 1913. 
Celi, G, de. Philosophie a la mode. (Gazette de 

France. Feb. 2nd.) 1914. Sorcier d 'Israel. 

{Ihid, 22 Feb.) 1914. 
Christiani, Ahhe L. M. Bergson et le materialisme. 

(Univers. 25 July.) 1913. 
Colonna, L, Bergson et son Enseignenement. (Rev. 

des Cours et des Conferences. 5 March.) 1914. 
Coly, R, Bergson 's Intellect and Matter. (Phil. 

Rev. T. 22.) 1913. 
Costelloe, K, Philos. of Bergson. (Monist. Vol. 

22.) 1914. What Bergson means by interpene- 

tration. (Pro. Ar. Soc, p. XIII.) 1913. 
Couchond, P, L. La metaphysique nouvelle. (Rev. 

de met et de mor.) 1902. 
Couturat, L, La theorie du temps de Bergson. 

(Rev. de met et de mor.) 1902. 
Crespij A, I. Le spirito nella filosofia del Bergson. 

II. La metafisica Bergsoniana. (Cultura con- 
temp. Vol. VI. Fasc. 4-5.) 1912. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 269 

Croce, B, Bergson e Taine. (Critica. X. 6.) 
1912. 

Cunningham. Bergson ^s conception of Duration. 
(Phil. Rev. XXII. 5.) 1914. Bergson's con- 
ception of finality. {Ibid. Vol. XXIII. 6.) 
1914. 

Dauriac, L. Reflexions sur la pMl. de Bergson. 
(Annee pMl. Vol. 22.) 1912. Mouvement 
Bergsonien. (Rev. phil. de la France et de 
Petranger. Vol. 75.) 1913. 

Dawid, J. Bergson et son Evolution creatrice. 
(Ksiazka Warsaw. 15 May.) 1913. 

Delisle-Burns, C. Bergson. (N. American Rev. 
Vol. 197.) 1913. 

Delmont, T. Philosophie a la Mode. (Univers. 14 
Feb.) 1914. 

Desaymard, J. La pensee d 'Henri Bergson. (Mer- 
cure de France.) 1913. Bergson a Clermont- 
Ferrand. (Bull. Mst. et scient. de PAuvergne.) 
1911. 

Dwelshauvers, G. La philos. de M. Bergson. (Rev. 
des courset conferences.) 1906-1907. Bergson 
et la methode intuitive. (Rev. du mois. Sept.) 
1907. Evolution et duree des la philos. de Berg- 
son. (Rev. de Puniversite de Bruxelles.) 1912. 

Evans, S. Bergson et Schopenhauer. (Renaiss. 
Contemp. 10 June.) 1913. La vie et Pintelli- 
gence. {Ibid. 24 June.) 1913. 

EwaldyO. Henri Bergson. (Lit. Echo. XV.) 1913. 

Farges,A. Cosmologie Bergsonienne. (Rev.d'Clerge 
Francais. 15 March.) 1913. 

Fawcett, E. D. Matter and Memory. {Mind. Vol. 
21. Jan.) 1912. 

Feuling, I). H. Bergson und der Thomismus. 
( Jaheb. f. Phil, und spin. Theologie. XXVII.) 
1912. 



270 SOME MODEEN FEENCH WEITEES 

Frank, S. L. Die Philosophie der Intuition von 

Bergson. (Eusskaja Mysl. III.) 1912. 
Garrigou-Lagrange, R. P. R. Chronique du meta- 

physique: autour du Blondelisme et du Berg- 

sonisme. (Eev. thorn. May- June.) 1913. 
Gemelli, H. Bergson und die italiensche Neusclic)- 

lastik. (Philos. jahrb. d. Gorres-Ges. Vol. 27. 

St. 4.) 1915. 
Gerrard, Th. H. Bergson and finalism. (Oath. 

World. June.) 1913. Bergson and Freedom. 

(Ibid. May.) 1913. Bergson 's Philos. of 

Change. (Ibid. Jan., Feb.) 1913. Bergson 

and the Divine fecundity. {Ibid. Aug.) 1913. 

Bergson, Newman and Aquinas. (Ibid. March.) 

1913. 
Gillouin, R. Philos. de Bergson. (Eev. de Paris. 

V. Jan.-Aug.) 1911. Philos. de M. Bergson. 

(POlivier. I.) 1914. 
Goldstein, Julius. H. Bergson and die Sozial wissen- 

schaft. (Archid. f. Sozial wies n Sozialpolitik. 

Vol. 31.) 1910. H. Bergson und die Zeitlosig- 

keitsidealismus. (Frank. Ztg. supplement.) 

1909. 
Gramsow, 0. Bergson. Westermann's Monat- 

shefte. Aug.) 1915. 
Granberry, J. Bergson and his philosophy. 

(Method. Eev. I.) 1913. 
Gundolfy E. H. Bergson 's Philosophie. (Jahrb. f. 

geist. Bewegg. III.) 1912. 
Harward, J. What does Bergson mean by Pure 

Perception! {Mind. April.) 1918. Second 

article, October, 1919. 
Hebert, M. Bergson et son af&rmation de Pexistence 

de Dieu. (Eev. de Puniv, de Bruxelles. 17.) 

1912. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 271 

Heymans, G. Be pMlosopMe van H. Bergson. 

(Tijdschr. wijsbeg.) 1912. Deux Memoires de 

Bergson. (Labor d. psychol. psysiol. d 1. Sor- 

bonne, Hautes Etudes, PAnnee psycbologique. 

19.) 1913. 
EocJcing, W. E. Significance of Bergson. (Yale 

Eeview, New Series III.) 1914. 
Hoeffding, H. Pbilosopbisclie Probleme. 1903. 
Hiiboner, G. Husserl, Bergson, George. (Die 

Giildenkammer. 111.) 1913. 
Jacobs B. La pbilosopMe d'Mer et celle d'au- 

jourd'hui. (Rev. de Meta. et de Morale. Vol. 

6.) 1898. 
Jacohy, G. Henri Bergson 's pragmatism und 

Schopenbauer. (Arcb. f. Hydrobiologie. IX.) 

1914. 
J antes y W. Tbe pbilosopby of Bergson. (Hibbert 

Journal. Vol. 7.) 1908. 
Johnstone, J. Bergson 's philosophy of organism. 

(Proc. of Liverpool biolog. soc. Vol.26.) 1913. 
Jordan. Kant and Bergson. (Monist. XXII. No. 

3.) 1913. 
Jourdain, E. B. Bergson and H. G. Wells. (Hib- 
bert Joum. X.) 1913. 
Joussain, A. L ^Expansion de Bergsonisme et la 

Psychologic musicale. (Eev. Bleue. I.) 1912. 
Kallen, H. M. James, Bergson and Traditional 

Metaphysics. (Mind. Jan.) 1914. 
Keeffe,D.O. Bergson's Critical Philosophy. (Irish 

Theol. Stud. April.) 1913. 
Kehr, T. Bergson und das Problem von Zeit und 

Dauer. (Arch. f. d. gesamte Psych. Vol. 

XXVI, Parts 1-2.) 1913. 
Keyserling, H. Bergson. (Beil 2. AUg. Ztg. No. 

35.) 1908. 



272 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

Kiefer, 0. Ueber Bergson's Philosophie. (Mars. 

23 May.) 1914. 
Klimhe, Fr. Henri Bergson der PMlos. d. Lebens. 

(Stimmen der Zeit. Vol.89.) 1915.^ 
Kohler, J. Bergson und die Recbts pbilosopbie. 

(Ardi f. Rechts— und Wirtscb— Phil. VH.) 

1913. 
Kronenherg, M. Henri Bergson und Hegel. (Lit. 

Echo. 16.) 1914. 
Lalande. Philosophy in France. (Phil. Rev. 

XXII.) 1914. 
LautsheerCy de. Les caracteres de la philosophie 

moderne. (Rev. neo-scolastique. XX, No. 77.) 

1913. 
Larges, A, Philosophie bergsonienne. (La Croix. 

Dec 2nd.) 1913. 
Larsson, Hans. Intuitions problemet. 1912. 
Lasserre, P. Que nous vent Bergson? (Act Fr. 

21 June.) 1913. Une critique de Bergson. 

(Act Fr. 29 June.) 1913. 
LatouVy P. C. de. La Vogue de trois Philosophes. 

(Gaulois du dimanche. 15 March.) 1914. 
Le Roy, E. Le positivisme nouveau. (Rev. de Met. 

et de Mor.) 1901. Science et philosophie. 

(Ihid.) 1900. 
Lewis, C. J. Bergson and contemporary thought. 

(IJniv. of California chron. Vol. 15.) 1914. 
Licorish, R. F. Bergson 's Creative Evolution. 

(Lancet. Vol. 182.) 
Lodge, Sir 0. Balfour and Bergson. (Hibb. Joum. 

X.) 1913. 
Lovejoy. Some Antecedents of the Philos. of Berg- 
son. {Mind. Oct.) 1913. Practical Tenden- 
cies of Bergsonism. (Internat. Joum. Ethics.) 

1913. Bergsonism and Romantic Evolutionism. 

{Univ. California Chron. XV.) 1914. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 273 

Macintosh, D. C. Bergson and religion. (Biblical 
World. Vol.41.) 1913. 

Maire, G, Bergsoniens contre Bergson. (La Re- 
vue. Vol. 106.) 1914. 

Maritain, J. Les deux bergsonismes. (Rev. tho- 
miste. XX. 4.) 1912. L 'esprit de la pHloso- 
pMe moderne. (Rev. de Philos.) 1914. L'evo- 
lutionisme de Bergson. (Rev. de Philos. Vol. 
18.) 1911. 

Marot, J. Le cours de Bergson. (Renaissance. 
Jan.) 1914. 

Mason, J. W, T. Bergson 's method confirmed. (N. 
American Rev.) 1913. 

Meredith, J. C, Critical side of Bergson 's Philoso- 
phy. (Westminster Rev. Vol. 177.) 1912. 

Messer, A. Bergson 's intuitive philosophie. (2tschr. 
f. Christ Erziehungswissch. VIII.) 1914. Ge- 
schichte der Philosophie. III. 1918. 

Mitchel, A. Studies in Bergson 's philosophy. 
(Bull, of Univ. of Kansas.) 1915. 

Montagne, R. P. Bergson et ses plus recents com- 
mentateurs. (Questions Actuelles. 17 May.) 
1913. 

Mories, A, Bergson and Mysticism. (Westminster 
Rev. Vol. 177.) 1912. 

Moore, A, W, Bergson and Pragmatism. (Philos. 
Rev. XXI.) 1912. 

Muller, E. H. Bergson. (Arch. f. syst. Phil. Vol. 
18.) 1912. 

Neve, P. Le pragmatisme et la philos. de Bergson. 
(Ann. de PInst. sup. de Philos. I.) 1912. 

Ostertag, E, H. Bergson. (Nene Kirchl. Ztschr.) 
1913. 

Perry, R. B, Philos. of Bergson. ( Journ. of phil. 
and psych. Vols. 8-9.) 1911. 



274 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WEITERS 



RadharJcrishnan, S. 

nistic? {Mind. 

solute Idealism. 
Reymond, A, Phil. 



Picard, G. Enquete sur Henri Bergson et son influ- 
ence sur la sensibilite contemporaine. (Grande 
Eevue. Feb.-March.) 1914. 

PitJcin, W. B. James and Bergson. (Journ. of 
Philos. Psych, and Scientific Methods. VII. 
April.) 1910. 

Prochdzko, R. Bergson *s intuitiver Naturalismus. 
(Cestea Mysl. XIV.) 1913. 

Quick, Rev. 0. Bergson 's Creative Evolution and 
the Individual. {Mind. Jan.) 1913. 

Rauhy F. La conscience du devenir. (Bev. de Met. 
et de Morale.) 1897. 

Is Bergson 's Philosophy Mo- 
July.) 1917. Bergson and Ab- 
{Mind. Jan. and July.) 1919. 
de Bergson et probleme de la 
raison. (Rev. de theol. et de phil. Hav. ser. I.) 
1913. Bergsonisme. {Ibid.) 1914. 

Rihoty Th. Le probleme de la pensee sans image et 
sans mots. (Rev. philos. An XXXVIII. 7.) 
1913. 

Russell, Bertrand. The Philos. of Bergson. (Mon- 
ist. Vol. 22. No. 3.) 1913. 

Salomon, J. Philos. of Bergson. {Mind.) 1911. 

Schdfhe, F. Bergson 's evol. creatrice in den Haupt- 
punkten dargestellt und beurteilt. (Thesis.) 
1914. 

Scott, T. W. The Pessimism of Bergson. (Hibbert 
Journ. XI. I.) 1913. The Pessimism of Cre- 
ative Evolution. {Mind. April.) 1913. 

Segond, J. Les antitheses de Bergson. (Ann. de 
Phil. Chretienne. XIV.) 1913. Bergson. (La 
chronique. 22 Feb.) 1914. 

Segur, N. Bergson en het Bergsonisme. ( Wetensch. 
bladen.) 1913. Bergson et Bergsonisme. (La 
Revue. Vol. 98.) 1912. L ^inteUectualisme et 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 275 

la philos. bergsonienne. (Eev. phil. July.) 

1917. 
Seilliere, E. ScMtzung und Wirkung der Phil. 

Bergsons un hentigen Frantireich. (Internat. 

Monatsschr. f. Wissch. Kunst u. Technik. Vol. 

7.) 1913. 
Seydl, E. H. Bergson's Intuitive Philosophie. 

(Allg. Littlatt. No. 3.) 1916. 
Shinner, H. W. Bergson's view of organic evo- 
lution. (Pop. Sc. Monthly. Vol. 82.) 1913. 
Shotwell, J. T. Bergson's Philosophy. (Pol. Sc. 01. 

Vol. 27.) 1913. 
Solomon, J. Phil, of Bergson. (Fort. Rev. Vol. 

96.) 1912. 
Stehhing, L, 8. The notion of truth in Bergson's 

theory of knowledge. (Proc. Artist Soc. Vol. 

12.) 1912. 
Stork, T. B, Bergson and his Philosophy. (Luther. 

Quest. 2.) 1913. 
Strange, Bergson 's theory of Intuition. (Monist. 

Vol. 25. 3.) 1913. 
Schrecker, P. H. Bergson 's Philos. der Personlich- 

keit. 1912. 
Schultze, Martin. Das Problem der Wahrheitser- 

kenntnis bei W. James und H. Bergson. 1913. 
Segond, J. L^intuition bergsonienne. 1913. 
Shastri, P. The conception of freedom in Hegd. 

Bergson, Indian Philosophy. 1915. 
St ebbing, L. S. Pragmatism and French Volun- 
tarism. 1915. 
Teodorescu, C, A, Die Erkenntnislehre Bergson 's. 

(Thesis. 56 pp.) 1914. 
Sujot, A, Le nouveau spiritisme de M. H. Berg- 
son. (Protestant. 9 Nov.) 1913. 
Taylor, K H. Bergson. (Quest. No. 1.) 1912. 



276 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

Tilgher, A. L'Esteticia di Bergson. (La Nuova 

Cultura.) 1913. 
Tonquedec, J, de, Bergsonisme et scholast. (Rev. 

crit. d. idees et d. lines. Vol. 23.) 1914. 
Towns end, J. G. Bergson and Religion. (Monist. 

Vol. 22.) 1913. 
Tranche, H, L 'evolution creatrice. (Rev. de phil.) 

1908. 
Visan, T. de. Ce que nous devons k Bergson. (Le 

Temps Present. 2 Feb.) 1914. 
Waterlow, S. Philos. of Bergson. (Quarterly Rev. 

Vol. 216.) 1912. 
White, E. M. Bergson and Education. (Ed. Rev. 

Vol. 47.) 1914. 
WUlcox, L. C, Some implications of Bergson 's 

philosophy. (N. Am. Rev. Vol. 199.) 1914. 
Williams. Syndicalism in France and its relation 

to the Philos. of Bergson. (Hibb. Journ. Vol. 

XII. 2.) 1914. 
Wilm, E. C Bergson and the philos. of Religion. 

(BibL World. New ser. Vol. 41.) 1913. 



MAURICE BARRES 

WORKS OP REFERENCE 

Gillouin, R. Maurice Bar res, 1907 (bibliogs.) A 

full bibliography is appended by M. Ad Van 

Bever to la Pensee de Maurice Barres, by Henri 

Massis, 1909. 
Jary, Jacques. Essai sur VArt et la psychologie de 

M, Barres, 1912. 
The latest works of M. Barres are: 

La Colline Inspiree, 1913. 

La Grande Pitie des Eglises de France, 1914. 

Les Traits Eternels de la France, 1916. 



877 



JULES EOMAINS 

WOKKS OF REFEEENCE 

Jean Moreas. Par Jean de Gourmont, 1905. ( Con- 
tains good bibliography.) 

Maurras, Charles. Anthinea. D'Athenes a Flor- 
ence. 7^® edition. Paris, 1912. 8vo. 

Eenriot, Emile. A quoi revent les jeunes gens? 
1913. 

Sergeant, E. 8. French Perspectives. 1917. 

Bersancourt, A, de. Francis Jammes, poete Chre- 
tien. 1910. 

Braun, T. Des poetes simples, Francis Jammes. 
1900. 

Lowell, Amy. Six French Poets. 1915. 

Duhamel, G., et Vildrac, C. Notes sur la technique 
poetique. 1910. 

Riviere, Jacques. Etudes (Baudelaire, Claudel, 
etc.) (Bibliogs.) 1911. 

J. de Tonquedec. L'oeuvre de Paul Claudel. 1917. 

Richard-Mounet, Louis. Paul Claudel. 1918. 



278 



CHAELES PEGUY 



WORKS OF REFEEENCE 



Lotte, E. J. Un Compagnon de Peguy; Joseph 

Lotte, 1875-1914. Preface par Mgr. Battifol. 

1917. 
Snares, Andre. Charles Peguy. 1915. 
Boudon, V, Avec Charles Peguy de la Lorraine a 

la Marne. 1916. 
Johannetj Rene. Peguy et ses Cahiers. 1914. 
Ealevy, Daniel. Charles Peguy. 1918. 

This book was published after the foregoing 

pages were written. 



CONTENTS OF 

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE 

PREMIERE SERIE. 



Vol. 

1900. 
I. 
6 Janvier. 



20 Janvier. 



I. 

5 fevrier. 



No. 



2. 



Charles P6guy. Lettre du Provincial; R6- 
pause au Provincial; le "Triomphe de la 
Republique." L'affaire Liebknecht. Avant 
la premiere quinzaine. 

Du second Provincial. Reponse provisoire. 
La preparation du congr^s socialiste na- 
tional. Travail des enfants. Quinzaine. 

Pour et centre le socialisme. La prepara- 
tion du congr^s socialiste national. Tra- 
vail des enfants. 



20 fevrier. 



Charles P^guy. De la grippe. La prepara- 
tion du congr^s socialiste national. Tra- 
vail des enfants. 



I. 

5 mars. 



La consultation intemationale ouverte k la 
Petite Republique sur l'affaire Dreyfus 
et le cas Millerand. 



279 



280 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 



20 mars. 

I. 

5 avril. 



Charles Peguy. De la grippe. 
Consultation Internationale. 



La mSme 



Charles P^guy. Annonce au Provincial; 
Tou jours de la grippe. La derniere pre- 
paration et la tenue du congres socialiste 
national — Jerome et Jean Tharaud, 2a 
lumi^re. 



I. 

20 avril. 



I. 
6 mai. 



8. Premiere annonce; Denxieme annonce. La 

meme consultation Internationale — Je- 
rome et Jean Tharaud, la lumihre. 

9. Charles Peguy. Entre deux trains — Rec- 

tifications : — Paul Laf argue. Le Social- 
isme et les Intellectuels. Jerome et Jean 
Tharaud, la lumikre. 



I. 

20 mai. 



10. Communications. Les Petits Teigneux. — 
Annonce. — Emile Vandervelde. BociaU 
isme et Collectivisme. 



I. 11. Charles Peguy. RSponse hrhve a Jaurha. 

4 juillet. Le Socialisme et les Intellectuels. Com- 

paraison. La meme consultation Inter- 
nationale. 

I. 12. Charles Peguy. Deuxibme sSrie au Provin- 

16 novembre. cial; Administration; Nouvelles commu- 

nications; Demi — reponse k M. Cyprien 
Lantier. 



1900. 
II. 

29 novembre. 



DEUXIEME SERIE. 
1900-1901. 



Ajournement. Nouvelles Communications. 
Ecole des Eautes Etudes Sociales, dis- 
cours de MM. Boutroux et Duclaux. 



II. 

17 decembre. 



Ren6 Salom6. Vers Vaotion. 



II. 

21 decembre. 



1901. 



II. 



3. Pour ma maison; administration; pages 

libres. Rectifications : Matinee : — Confe- 
rence, Parti Socialiste. Comit6 g^n^ral, 
dimanche 22 juillet 1900, etc. Conference 
donn^e ce jour par Jean Jaur^s, le tMdtre 
social. 

4. Hubert Lagardelle. Les Intellectuels devant 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 



281 



18 Janvier 



le Socialisme, causerie faite au groupe 
des etudiants collectivistes de Paris, le 
14 decembre 1900. L'anmistie et lea 
socialistes. 



II. 

28 Janvier. 



Ou il y a des renseignements et des avis de 
radministration ; pour moi; contribution 
aux Preuves, etc. (Diff6rents articles sur 
TAffaire Dreyfus, Lionel Landry, courrier 
de Chine.) 



II. 
7 fevrier. 



Romain Kolland. Danton. Trois actes. 



II. 

2 mars. 



Administration; Cassecou; librairie des 
Cabiers Pour et Contre Diderot, confron- 
tation; Dans la Petite RSpuhlique, datee 
du mardi 31 juillet 1900, discours pro- 
nonce par Anatole France, etc. 



II. 
2 mars. 

II. 
19 mars. 



II. 
4 avril. 



8. 
0. 

10. 



Lionel Landry, 
actes. 



Bacchus, drame en trolB 



Intellectuels et Socialisme: une contribu- 
tion de M. Paul Mantoux, etc.; une con- 
tribution de M. Charles Guyesse. In- 
tellectuels et Socialisme Andr6 Bourgeois. 
Quatre jours a Montceau. 

Cahiers d'annonces, etc. 



II. 

25 avril. 



II. 

13 juin. 



11. La revolution sociale sera morale ou elle 

ne sera pas, etc. Charles P^guy. 
Compte-rendu de mandat. 

12. Antonin Lavergne. Jean Coste ou VInati- 

tuteur de Village. Octobre 1894-juin 
1895. Evreux. 



II. 

22 juln. 



13. Librairie des cahiers. Jean Coste. Georges 
Sorel, Quelques mots sur Proudhon, etc. 
Couverture: Immense victoire socialiste. 



II. 14. Couverture : Emouvant d^bat socialiste. — 

6 juillet. Expulsion de Nicolas Paouli, Lionel 

Landry. Courrier de Chine. L6on 
Deshairs, Boecklin chez les Frangais. 
Louise L6vi, Congrbs de Lyon, 26-28 mai 
1901. etc. 



II. 



15. M6moires et Dossiers pour les libert^s du 



282 SOME MODEEN FRENCH WRITERS 

23 juillet. personnel enseignant en France; Preface 

dugerant: Interpellation Lavertuj on. Le 
cas Jaures. Daniel Delafarge. M. Brv/ne- 
tiere historien. Attentats dans TYonne. 



II. 
13 adut. 



1901. 



III. 
1 octobre. 



III. 
17 octobre. 

III. 
26 octobre. 

III. 
5 d^cembre. 



16. Compte-rendu stenographique du Cinqui^me 
Congres Socialiste international, tenu k 
Paris du 23 au 27 septembre 1900. 

TROISIEME SERIE. 



1. Compte-rendu de congres; bilan; Attentata 

dans I'Yonne, suite; I'affaire du Pioupiou 
de VYonne, etc. 

2. Charles Guyesse. Les Universit^s Popu- 

laires et le mouvement ouvrier. 

3. Georges Sorel. De I'Eglise et de I'Etat. 

4. Jean Jaures. Etudes Socialistea. 



III. 

19 d^cembre. 

III. 

28 d^cembre. 

1902. 
III. 
16 Janvier. 

III. 
13 fevrier. 

III. 
25 fevrier. 

III. 

D6but de Mars. 

III. 

20 mars. 



Georges Delahache. Juifa. 

Jean Hugues. La Greve, — trois actea. 



7. M. Gustave Tery, Polemiques et dossiers. 

Lettre de F. Challaye sur I'lndo-Chine. 

8. Bernard Lazare. Les Juifs en Roumanie. 



9. Tolstoi. Une lettre in^dite, adress^e, k Re- 
main Rolland, datee du 4 octobre 1887. 

10. Les Universites Populaires 1900-1901. Paris 

et banlieue. 

11. Romain Rolland. Le Quatorze Juillet. 

Trois actes. 



III. 
5 avril. 

III. 
16 avril. 



12. Monographies. PersonnaliUa. 



13. Jerome et Jean Tharaud. Dingley. L'il- 
lustre ecrivain. 



III. 



14. Georges Sorel, Socialismes nationaux, dat6 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



283 



22 avril. 



III. 
29 avril. 

III. 
24 znai. 

III. 
3 juin. 



III. 
10 juin. 

Ill 
26 juin. 



III. 
22 juillet. 



III. 
16 aout. 



novembre 1901. 
Felicien Challaye. La Russie vue de Vladi- 
vostok, journal d'un expulse. 

16. Anatole France. Cahiers de la Qumzaine. 



16. Les Elections; emprunt des cahiers. 



17. Felicien Challaye, impressions sur la vie 

japonaise. 
Edmond Bernus, la Russie vue de la VistulCj, 
Jean Deck — Courrier de Finlande. 

18. Personnalites. Monographies. 
Rend Salome, courrier de Belgique. 

19. Pierre Quillard. Pour I'Arminie. 
Cahier de Courriers. 

Impressions sur la vie Japonaise de Felicien 
Challaye. 

20. Les Universitds populaires. Ddpartementsi 
La Russie vue de la Vistule. (Anonyme.) 
Courrier de Finlande. (Anonyme.) 

21. Jean Deck. Pour la Finlande. 



IV. 


1. 


9 octobre. 




IV. 


2. 


23 octobre. 




IV. 


3. 


4 novembre. 




IV. 


4. 


20 novembre. 




IV. 


5. 


4 ddcembre. 





QUATRIEME SERIE. 
1902-1903. 

Anatole France. UA^aire CrinqueMlle. 



Moselly. L*Auhe fraternelle. 

Charles Pdguy. De Jean Coste; conclusion. 



Antonin Lavergne. La MMaille. La lettre 
de convocation. 

Textes et commentaires. Emile Zola. (Fu- 

ndrailles d'Emile Zola. Gabriel Trarieux; 

Emile Zola.) 
Les recentes ceuvres de Zola. (Essai de 

Pdguy.) 
Lettre de Zola k M. Fdlix Faure, president 

de la Rdpublique, 



284 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

IV. 6. Cahier de Courrier. Courrier de Paris. 

18 d6ceinbre. Inventaire des Cahiers. 

IV. 7. Cahier de Noel. Quelques vers de Villon. 

23 d^cembre. Trois lettres de Tolstoi; J6r6me et Jean 

Tharaud — la legende de la Vierge. Louis 
Gillet. la tour d' Armor. 



IV. 

30 d^cembre. 

1903. 
IV. 
13 Janvier. 



8. Ren6 Salom6. Monsieur Matou et les cir- 

constances de sa vie, 4crit k Bruxelles en 
1902. 

9. Almanack des cahiers pour Fan 1903. F6- 

licien Challaye, second courrier d'lndo- 
Cliine. 



rV. 10. Remain Rolland. Yie des hommea illitatreB. 

27 Janvier. Beethoven. 

IV. 11. Edouard Berth. La politique anticUrioalg 

3 f^vrier. et le socialisme. 



IV. 

17 f^vrier. 

IV. 
24 f^vrier. 



IV. 
12 mars. 



12. Vient de paraltre. Henri Bergson. Intro- 

duction k la M^taphysique. Conclusion. 

13. Cahiers de Courriers. F^licien Challaye. 

Impressions sur Java. Francois Dagen. 
Courrier d'Alg^rie. 

14. Eomain Holland. Le Temps viendra. Trois 

actes. 



IV. 
1 avril. 

IV. 
9 avril. 

IV. 
28 avril. 



16. 
16. 
17. 



Pierre Baudouin (Charles P6guy). 
chanson du roi Dagobert. 



La 



Gabriel Trarieux. Les Vaincus. 
d'Arimathde (trois actes). 



Joseph 



Affaire Dreyfus. Dihats parlementairet. 
Intervention Jaurfes. 



IV. 
12 mai. 

IV. 
26 mai. 



18. Affaire Dreyfus. Cahiers de la Quinz<wne, 

D6bats parlementaires. 

19. Gaston Raphael. Le Rhin allemand. 



IV. 
16 juin. 

IV. 

21 juillet. 



20. Affaire Dreyfus. Cahiers de la Quinzaine. 

Reprise politique parlementaire. 

21. Edgar Quinet. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 



285 



IV. 
25 adut. 



22. 



Maurice Kahn. Courriers de Mac^doine. 



CINQUIEME SERIE. 
1903-1904. 

V. 1. Henri Dagan. Les massacres de Kichinef 

13 octobre. et la situation des prol^taires juifs en 

EuBsie. 



V. 

27 octobre. 

V. 
10 novembre. 



V. 

24 novembre. 

V. 

8 d^cembre. 

V. 
24 d^cembre. 



2. Paul Dupuy. La vie d*Evariste Oalloia. 



3. Cahier de Tinauguration du monument de 

Renan k Tr^guier, le dimanche, treize 
septembre 1903. 

4. Romain Holland. Le ThSdtre du Peuple. 



6. Georges C16menceau. Discours pour la 
lihertS. 

6. Daniel Hal6vy. Histoire de quatre ans 
1997-2001. 



V. 

6 Janvier. 



V. 
19 Janvier. 

V. 

4 f^vrier. 

V. 

18 fdvrler. 

V. 

I mars. 

V. 

15 mars. 

V. 
29 mars. 

V. 

II arril. 



1904. 



7. Cahier de Courriers. Henri Michel. Notes 

sur la Hollande et sur I'lntimit^ — Le- 
beau et Tharaud. Moines de I'Athos — 
Bulletin de I'office du Travail. La gr6ve 
des Tisseurs d'Armentiferes — Charles P6- 
guy. Cahiers de la Quinzaine. 

8. Dr. Karl Brimnemann. Maximilien Robes- 

pierre. 

0. Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. L'auhe. 



10. 



11. 



12. 



Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. 
matin. 



Le 



M. M. Mangasarian. Le Monde sans Dieu. 
Avertissement de P6guy. 

Petites Garnisons. Laval. Orleans. Paris. 
Charles P^guy. Avertissement. 



13. Gabriel Trarieux. Les vaincus. Hypatie. 



14. Joseph B^dier. Gaston Paris. 



286 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 



V. 
26 avril. 

V. 
24 mai. 

V. 

9 juin. 

V. 

28 juin. 

V. 

16 juillet. 

V. 

13 Beptembre. 



VI. 

27 Beptembre. 



VI. 

11 octobre. 

VI. 

27 octobre. 

VI. 

8 novembre. 

VI. 

22 novembre. 

VI. 

6 d^cembre. 



VI. 

22 d^cembre. 



1905. 
VI. 
12 Janvier. 

VI. 
24 Janvier. 



15. Emile Moselly. Jean des Brehis ou le livre 

de la Misere. 

16. Gaston Raphael. Le Congrfea de Dresde. 

Septembre. 1903. 

17. Frangois Porcli6. A chaque jour. Poemes. 

18. Louis Menard. Prologue d'une Revolution. 



19. JerSme et Jean Tharaud. Les Hohereaux. 

Histoire vraie. 

20. Congrfes des U. P. Mai 1904- 



SIXIEME SERIE. 
1904-1905. 

1. Charles P6guy. Texte sans commentaires. 

Catalogue analytique sommaire. 1900- 
1904. 

2. Alexis Bertrand. USgalitS devant Vi/nstruc- 

tion. 

3. Israel Zangwill. Chad Gadya: traduit de 

I'anglais par Mathilde Solomon. 

4. Raoul Allier. Uenseignement primaire de» 

indigenes d Madagascar. 

5. Le Testament politique de Waldeck Rous- 

seau. 

6. Elie Eberlin; Georges Delahache. Juifa 

russes — Le bund et le Bionisme; un 
voyage d'etudes. 

7. Cahier de Noel. 

Frangois Porch^. A ma grand'mere. Les 

primitifs frangais. 
Louis Gillet. — Nos maitres d'autrefois — 

Les Primitifs. 
Jerome et Jean Tharaud. Contea de la 

Vierge. 

8. Remain Rolland. Jean Christophe III. 

L'adolescent. 

9. La delation aux Droits de Vhomme. 



V J.. 

7 fevrier. 


xu. 


VI. 
21 fevrier. 


11. 


VI. 

7 mars. 


12. 


VI. 

21 mars. 


13. 


VI. 
4 avril. 


14. 


VI. 
20 avril. 


15. 


VI. 

9 mai. 


16. 


VI. 
23 mai. 


17. 



VII. 
26 septembre. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 287 

Brenn. Yves Madic, professeur de college. 
11. Suares. La tragedie d'Elektre et Oreste. 
Urbain Gohier. Spartacus — cinq actes. 



Tolstoi — L'Eglise et VEtat; les evenementa. 
actuels en Bussie. 

Une campagne du Siecle : — Kaoul Allier, • — 
la separation des Eglises et de VEtat; 
Venquete du Siecle: resultats et conclu- 
sions de cette enquete par de Lanessan. 

Eddy Marix. La tragedie de Tristan et 
Iseut. Cinq actes. 

Robert Dreyfus. La vie et les prophetiea 
du comte de Gohineau. 

Paul Desjardins. Catholicisme et critique. 
Eeflexions d'un profane but Taflfaire 
Loisy. 

SEPTIEME SERIE. 

Charles Peguy. Petit index alphab^tique 
du catalogue analytique sommaire, et 
table analytique trfes sommaire de la 
sixieme serie. 



VII. 
3 octobre. 

VII. 
17 octobre. 

VII. 
26 octobre. 

VII. 
14 novembre. 



VII. 

21 novembre. 

VII. 

12 decembre. 



Charles Richet. La paix et la guerre. 



3. Charles Peguy. Notre patrie. 



4. Raoul Allard. La Separation des Eglises et 

de I'Etat; la separation au 84nat. 

5. Charles Peguy. Courrier de Russie. 

Etienne Avenard. Le 22 Janvier nouveau 
^ style. 

6. Pierre Mille. Uenfer du Congo Uopoldien. 

E. D. Morel. Preface; post-scriptum. 

7. Charles Peguy. Les suppliants paralUlea. 

Frangois Porche. Les Suppliants. 



28a SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 



VII. 
26 d^cembre. 


8. 


Charles P^guy. Louis de Gonzague. Andr6 
Spire: Et vous riez, — po^mes. 


VII. 
9 Janvier 1906. 


9. 


Ferdinand Lot. De la situation faite d 
I'enseignement sup6rieur en France. 


VII. 
25 Janvier. 


10. 


Jerome et Jean Tharaud. Les frbrea 
ennemis. 


VII. 
6 fdvrier. 


11. 


Ferdinand Lot. De la situation faite d 
I'enseignement superieur en France. 


VII. 
20 f6vrier. 


12. 


Felicien Challaye. Le Congo frangais. Les 
dernier s jours de M. de Brazza. 


VII. 
6 mars. 


13. 


Georges Picquart, lieutenant-colonel en r6- 
forme. De la situation faite d, la defense 
militaire de la France. 


VII. 
20 mare. 


14. 


Gabriel Trarieux. Les vaincus. Savonarole 


VII. 
3 avril. 


16. 


Gabriel Trarieux. Arnold BcUrer. 


VII. 
17 avril. 


16. 


Pierre Mille. Les deux Congos devant la 
Repuhlique et devant la France. Felicien 
Challaye. La reorganisation du Congo 
Frangais. 


VII. 
29 mai. 


17. 


Jean Schlumberger. Heureux qui comme 

XJlysse. . . . 


VII. 
26 juin. 


18. 


Romain Holland. La vie de Michel Ange. 
I. la lutte. 


VII. 
24 juillet. 


19. 


Emile Moselly — les Betours — lea haleurt 
— le soldat. 



VIII. 



VIII. 



HUITIEME SERIE. 

Charles P^guy. Petit index alphabStique 
de nos editions ant^rieures et de nos sept 
premieres series (1900-1906). Table ana- 
lytique trfes sommaire de notre septi^me 
s^rie (1905-1906). 

Romain Rolland. Vie des hommes illustres. 
La vie de Michel Ange. II. L'abdica- 
tion. 



VIII. 
4 novembre. 



Charles P6guy. De la situation faite b, 
Vhistoire et d la Bociologie dans les tempa 
modemea. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 



289 



VIII. 



VIII. 
2 ddcembre. 

VIII. 
16 decembre. 

VIII. 
23 decembre. 



7. 



Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. IV. La 
revolte. 1. Sables mouvants. 

Charles Peguy. De la situation faite ati 
parti intellectuel dans le monde modeme. 

Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. IV. La 
revolte. 2. L'Enlisement. 

Charles-Marie Gamier. Les sonnets de 
Shakespeare. Essais d'une interpretation 
en vers frangais. 



VIII. 
30 decembre. 



Jean Bonnerot. Le livre des livres. 
ments. 



Frag- 



1907. 
VIII. 
6 Janvier. 

VIII. 



9. Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. IV. La 
Revolte. 

10. Edmond Bernus. Polonais et Prussiens. 
I. La D^livrance. 



VIII. 
3 f^vrier. 



11. Jer6me et Jean Tharaud. Bar-Cochehaa. 



VIII. 

VIII. 
3 mars. 



12. Edmond Bernus. Polonais et Prussiens. II. 

13. Henriette Cordelet. Swift. 



VIII. 
Mars. 

VIII. 
31 mars. 



VIII. 
14 avril. 



14. 



15. 



16. 



Edmond Bernus. 
III. 



Polonais et Prussiens. 



Charles-Marie Gamier. Les Sonnets de 
Shakespeare. Essai d'une interpretation 
en vers frangais. II. 

Georges Sorel. Les preoccupations mita- 
physiques des physiciens modemea. Avant- 
propos de Julien Benda. 



NEUVIEME SERIE. 

IX. 1. Charles P^guy. De la situation faite au 

6 octobre. parti intellectuel dans le monde modeme 

devant les accidents de la gloire tempo- 
1 Telle. 



IX. 2. Robert Dreyfus. Quarante-Huit. 

20 octobre. d'histoire contemporaine. 



Essais 



290 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 



IX. 

3 novembre. 



Etienne Buisson. Le parti eocialiste et lea 
Syndicats. 



IX. 

17 novembre. 



4. 



Emile Moselly. Le rouet dHvoire. (En- 
fances lorraines.) 



IX 

I d^cembre. 



Jean Deck et G. von Wendt. La repriaenta- 
Hon proportionnelle et la rScente loi ileo' 
torale du QramL-ducM de Fvnlande. 



IX. 

15 d^cembre. 

IX. 

29 ddcembre. 



(J. Daniel Hal6vy. Un Episode. 



7. Ren* SalomS. Par le Chemin dee Sou- 
venances. ( Pofemes. ) 



rx. 

D^cembre 1907 

or 
Janvier 1908 T 



8. 



Gaston Raphael. Der Professor iat die 
deutsche National Krankheit. 



1908. 
IX. 
26 Janvier. 



Robert Dreyfus. Alexandre Weill, ou le 
prophfete du faubourg Saint Honors, 1811- 
1899. 



IX. 



10. Maxime VuiUaume. Mes cahlers rouges. 
i I. Une joum4e d, la oour martiale du 
Luxembourg. Avant-propos de Lucien 
Descaves. 



IX. 



11. Maxime Vuillaume. Mes cahiers rouges. 
II. Un peu de vSritS sur la mori det 
otages, 24 et 26 mai 1871. 



IX. 



12. Maxime Vuillaume. Mes cahiers rouges. 
III. Quand nous faisions le "Phre 
DuchSne." Mars, avril, mai, 1871. 



IX. 

22 mars. 


13. 


IX. 
29 mars. 


14. 


IX. 
5 avril. 


16. 


IX. 

6 juillet. 


10. 



Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. La 
Foire sur la Place. I. 

Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. La 
Foire sur la Place. II. 



Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe & Paris. 
Antoinette. 



Pierre Mille. Quand Panurge Resauscita. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



291 



X. 

18 octobre. 

X. 

1 Dorembre. 

X. 



X. 

28 novembre. 

X. 

13 d^cembre. 

X. 

27 d^cembre. 



1909. 



X. 



X. 



X. 

16 f^vrier. 

X 

23 f.Vrler. 



X. 

25 avrU. 


12. 


XI. 

10 octobre. 


1. 


XI. 

24 octobre. 


2. 


XI. 

7 novembre. 


3. 


XI. 

6 d^cembre. 


4. 


XI. 
19 d^cembre. 


6. 



DIXIEME SEEIE. 

1. Pierre Mille. U Enfant et la Reine Morte. 

2. Pierre Hamp. Dix Contes iorits dans le 

Nord. 

3. Pierre Hamp. La Peine des Hommes. I. La 

Maree fraiche. 

4. Pierre Hamp. La Peine des Hommes. II. 

Vin de Champagne. 

6. A. Suarfes. Le Portrait d'Ibsen. 

6. Ren6 Salom^. Plus prfes des chosee. 



7. Maxime Vuillaume. Mea cahiers rouges. 

IV. Quelques-uns de la Commune. 

8. Maxime Vuillaume. Mes cahiers rouges. 

V. Pwr la Ville Revolt ee. 

9. Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe & Paris. 

Dans la maison. I. 

10. Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe ii Paris. 

Dans la maison. II. 

11. Maxime Vuillaume. Mes cahiers rouges. 

VI. Au large. 

12. Daniel Halevy. Le travail de Zarathoustra 
(a criticism of Friedrich Nietzsche). 

A. Suarfes. Visite A Pascal. 



Gabriel Trarieux. Le Portique. 

Albert Thierry. L* Homme en proie aux 
enfants. 

Georges Delahache. La carte au lisSrd vert. 
Andre Spire. Israel Zangwill. 



292 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 

1910. 



XI. 

16 Janvier. 

XI. 

30 Janvier. 

XI. 

13 f^vrier. 

XI. 



XI. 
10 avril. 

XI. 
24 avril. 

XI. 
17 juillet. 



XI. 
7 aout. 

XI. 

21 a6ut. 



XII. 
23 octobre. 

XII. 

20 novembre. 

XII. 

4 decembre. 

XII. 

18 decembre. 



XII. 
15 Janvier. 

XII. 
29 Janvier. 

XII. 

19 f^vrier. 

XII. 
19 mars. 



1911. 



6. Charles Peguy. Le mystfere de la charity 

de Jeanne d'Are. 

7. Remain Rolland. Jean Christophe. La Fin 

du voyage. Les amies. I. 

8. Remain Rolland. Jean Christophe. La 

Fin du Voyage. Les amies. II. 

9. Maxime Vuillaume. Mes cahiers rouges. 

VII. Dernier cahier. 

10. Daniel Halevy. Apologie pour notre pass6. 



11. Joseph M^lon. La maison vers le lac. 

(Poemes.) 

12. Charles Peguy. Notre Jeunesse. Une 

famille de r^publicains fourrieristes. Lea 
Milliet. 

13. Les Milliet. I. Jusqu'au seuil de Vexil. 



14. Les Milliet. II. Les adieux. 
DOUZIEME SERIE. 
1. Charles Peguy. Victor-Marie, comte Hugo. 



2. Les Milliet. III. La maison m'appartient. 

Charles P^guy. "Les amis des cahiers." 

3. Julien Benda. Mon premier testament. 



4. Les Milliet. IV. Vies paralUles d'un soldat 
et d'un ecolier. 



5. Julien Benda. Dialogue d'Eleuthfere. 

6. Les Milliet. V. Jours heureux. 

7. A. Suarfes. Tolstoi vivant. 

8. Les Milliet. VI. Mes Maitres et mes amis. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 



293 



XII. 
30 avril. 

XII. 
25 juin. 



XIII. 
6 adut. 

XIII. 
24 septembre. 

XIII. 

8 octobre. 

XIII. 
22 oct ore. 

XIII. 
5 novembre. 

XIII. 
12 novembre. 

XIII. 
26 novembre. 

XIII. 
10 d^cembre. 

XIII. 
24 d6cembre. 

XIII. 
31 decembre. 



0. Julian Benda. L'ordination. 



10. Les Milliet. VII. Adrien de Tuc6. Cinq 
ans au Mexique 1862-1867. Charles P6- 
guy. CEuvres choises de Charles P4guy. 

TREIZIEME SERIE. 



1. 
2. 
3. 

4. 
5. 
6. 

7. 
8. 



Les Milliet. VIII. Voyage d'etudes en 
Italie 1868-1869. 

Charles P^guy. Un nouveau th^ologien. 
M. Fernand Laudet. 

Les Milliet. IX. La guerre de France et le 
Premier Siege de Paris 1870-1871. 

Charles Peguy. II. Le Porche du Mystfere 
de la Deuxieme Vertu. 

Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. Le 
huisson ardent. I. 



Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. 
luisson ardent. II. 



Le 



Les Milliet. X. La Commune et le Second 
Si^ge de Paris. 1871. 

A. Suar^s. Dostoievski. 



9. Les Milliet. XI. Un cas de conscience 1871- 
73. 

10. Joseph M61on. L'ami disabuse. (Poemes.) 



1912. 
XIII. 

Janvier ( ? ) . 

XIII. 
24 mars. 



11. Maxime Vuillaume. Mes cahiers rouges. 

VIII. Deux drames, 

12. Charles Peguy. III. Le mystfere des Saints 

Innocents. 



XIV. 
28 juillet. 

XIV. 
6 octobre. 



QUATORZIEME SERIE. 

1. A. Suar^s. De Napoleon. 

2. Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. III. La 

fin du voyage. La Nouvelle Journ^e. I. 



294 SOME MODERN FRENCH WRITERS 



XIV. 
20 octobre. 

XIV. 

novembre (?) 

XIV. 
1 d^cembre. 



3. Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. III. La 

fin du voyage. La Nouvelle Journ^e. II. 

4. Julian Benda. L'Ordination. 11. La Chute. 



5. Charles Peguy. La tapisserie de Sainte 
Genevieve et de Jeanne d'Arc. 



1913 
XIV. 
16 f^vrier. 

XIV. 
2 mars. 

XIV. 
16 mare. 

XIV. 
27 avril. 

XIV. 

11 mai. 

XIV. 



6. Charles P6guy. L'argent. Langlois tel 

qu'on le parle. 

7. Th. Naudy. Depuis 1880. L'enseignement 

primaire et ee qu'il devrait ^tre. 

8. Rene Salome. Les chants de Vdme rS- 

veillee. 

9. Charles Peguy. L'argent. (Suite.) 



10. Charles P^guy. La tapisserie de Notre 

Dame, 

11. Maxime Vuillaume. Mes cahiers rouges. 

(Pofemes. ) Lettres et temoignages. 



XV. 

23 octobre. 

XV. 
23 novembre. 

XV. 

14 decembre. 

XV. 

28 decembre. 



QUINZIEME SERIE. 

1. Edmond Fleg. Ecoute, Israel. (Po^mes.) 

2. Julien Benda. Une philosophie path^tique. 



3. Joseph Reinach. La loi militaire. Fixity 

des eflfectif 8. 

4. Charles P^guy. Eve. (Pofeme.) 



1914. 



XV. 
25 Janvier. 

XV. 

22 fdvrier. 



XV. 
24 mars. 



6. A. Suarfes. Frangoia Villon. 



George Delahache. L'exode. (A descrip- 
tion of the departure of French inhab- 
itants from Alsace-Lorraine, 1871.) 



Ren6 Salom^. Notre pays. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 295 

XV. 8. Charles Peguy. Note sur M. Bergson et 

26 avril. la philosophie bergsonienne. 

XV. 9. Maxime Vuillaume. Proscrits. 
14 juin. 

XV. 10. Francois Porcli6. Nous. Poemes. 
12 juillet. 



OEUVRES. COMPLETES DE 

CHARLES PEGUY. 

1873-1914. 

CEuvres de Prose 

Introduction par Alexandre Millerand 

Edition de la Nouvelle Revue Frangoise 

Tome I. 1917. Notre Jeunesse. Victor Marie, comte Hugo 

Tome IV. Introduction par Andr6 Suar^s. 

Clio. CEuvre posthume. 

Tome VIII. 

Th^ese are the only volumes published up to date of going to press. 



INDEX 



Adam, Mme. Edmond, 126 
"A. E.," 184-185 
^schylus, 172, 174 
"Agathon,** 243-244 
Alexander, 147 
Amiel, 112 
Arcos, Ren6, 192 
Aristotle, 4, 167 
Augustine, St., 93 



B 



Balfour, A. J., xii-xiii, 38 

Balzac, Honor6 de, 2, 111, 202, 
253 

Banville, Theodore de, 137 

Barres, Maurice, vi, xi-xii, 12, 
20, 26-27, 33, 48, 79-106, 134, 
138, 200-201, 207-208, 213, 247, 
249, 259 

Barthez, P. J., 42 

Battifol, 214, 230 

Baudelaire, Charles, 34, 81, 100, 
112, 114, 159, 161-163, 168, 
176-177, 186, 188, 197, 203, 
247, 250-251 

Bazaillas, Albert, 133 

Beaumarchais, P. A., 225 

Beaunier, Andre, 19, 27-30, 201, 
258 

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 23 

Bellay, Joachim du, 197, 206 

Benda, Julien, 78 

Berard, Alexandre, 36 

Bergson, Henri, ii-xiii, 4, 9, 11- 
12, 20-23, 29, 35, 41-49, 51-78, 
80, 88, 90, 93, 99, 116-117, 125, 
129-130, 149-155, 157, 163, 165- 
169, 176, 178, 183, 186-187, 191- 
192, 195-197, 202, 207, 212, 214- 
222, 224-230, 233, 235, 237-238, 
241-243, 246-248, 250, 254-257, 
259 



Berkeley, George, 57, 61-62, 64- 

65, 69, 78, 155 
Bernard, Claude, xi, 3, 7, 9 
Bernard, Jean-Marc, 126 
Berr, Henri, 229 
Berrichon, Paterne, 159 
Berth, Edouard, 77 
Bertrand, Louis, 126, 202, 251 
Besnard, Albert, 34 
Beyle, Henri, 81, 90, 100, 109- 

111, 115, 142, 146, 173, 239, 247 
Bichat, M. F., 42 
Bidou, Henri, 202 
Biran, Maine de, 42, 216 
Blake, William, 159 
Blondel, Maurice, 12, 15 
Boileau-Despreaux, Nicholas, 1, 

188 
Boirac, Emile, 43, 50 
Boisl^re, Rene, 201 
Bonnier, Gaston, 6-7 
Bordeaux, Henri, 201 
Borel, Petrus, 114 
Boasuet, J. B., 25 
Boudon, v., 213 
Bouilhet, Louis, 209 
Boulanger, General, 92 
Bourget, Paul, 12, 38, 107-130, 

141, 147, 209, 247, 249, 257 
Boutroux, Emile, 9-12 
Breal, Michel, 11 
Brereton, Cloudesley, 230 
Brillant, Maurice, 185 
Brochard, Victor, 15 
Browning, E. B., 38 
Browning, Robert, viii, 179 
Bruhl, L6vy, 47 
Brunetifere, Ferdinand, 12, 20, 24- 

27, 38, 41, 130, 141 
Brunhes, Bernard, 7-8 
Brunschvieg, L6on, 15 
Bunyan, John, 160-161, 176 
Butler, Samuel, 69-70 
Byron, Lord, 80, 84, 177, 209 



297 



298 



INDEX 



Cabanis, P. J., 42 

Callot, Jacques, 81 

Calmettes, Fernand, 140, 147 

Calvin, Jolm, i 

Carlyle, Thomas, viii, x, 37-38, 

67, 84, 155, 228 
Cazin, J. C, 34 
Charcot, J. M., 3 
Chasles, Philarfete, 37 
Chateaubriand, F. A., 2, 27, 80, 

141-142 
Ch§,teaubriant, Alphonse de, 201 
Chavannes, Puvis de, 34 
Chenier, Andr6, 137, 210, 238 
Chennevi^re, Georges, 192 
Chesterton, G. K., v, 38 
Chevassu, F., Ill 
Chide, A., 47 
Claudel, Paul, xi, 39, 66, 155-185, 

186-187, 194, 211, 223 
Clermont, Emile, 242-260 
Clermont, Louise, 254, 256 
Coleridge, S. T., 55-56, 72, 84 
Comte, Auguste, ix, xi, 3, 24, 83, 

96, 125-126 
Constant, Benjamin, 80, 202, 239, 

247 
Coppee, FrauQois, 185 
Corbi^re, Tristan, 205 
Corneille, Pierre, 1, 102, 225 
Courbet, Gustave, 35 
Cousin, Victor, 87 
Cresson, Andr^, 14 
Croce, Benedetto, 226 
CromweU, Oliver, 97, 228 
Curel, Frangois de, 29-30 



Dante, 27, 84 

Darbenne-Mincenot, 28 

Darwin, Charles, v, viii, 6, 24, 

37, 72, 112 
Daumier, Honor^, 36, 114 
Dauriac, Lionel, 15 
De Bussy, Claude, 205 
Degas, Edgar, 36 
Delacour, Andr^, 185 
Delacroix, 45 

Delarue-Madrus, Mme., 211 
Delbos, Victor, 15, 242 



Demange, Charles, 249, 257 
Denis, Maurice, 34 
Deroulede, Paul, 12 
Descartes, Ren^, i, ii, ix, 4, 10, 

62, 68, 78, 87, 93 
Desjardins, Paul, v, 38 
Dickens, Charles, 39, 258 
Diderot, Denis, x, 144, 248 
Dieux, Leon, 185 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 79-80, 84, 89, 

96, 100 
Dodson, G. R., viii 
Dostoiewski, Fyodor, 36, 258 
Doumic, Ren6, 212, 238 
Dreyfus, Alfred, 141, 146, 215- 

216 
Du Camp, Maxima, vii 
Duhamel, Georges, 155-156, 192 
Duhem, 7-8 

Dujardin, Edouard, 33 
Dumas, Alexandre, 43, 201 
Dunan, 15 

Durkheim, Emile, 45, 47, 187 
Durtain, Luc, 192 



B 



Egger, Victor, 15 
Eliot, George, 38, 120, 222, 227 
Emerson, R. W., 52, 120, 142, 162 
Euripides, 134 



Fabre, J. H., 60 

Faguet, Emile, 12, 30-32, 46, 125, 

207 
Faraday, Michael, 61 
Farges, A., 78 
Feydeau, E. A., 202 
Fichte, J. G., 51, 85, 87 
Flammarion, Ernest, 5 
Flaubert, Gustave, vii, ix, 2, 87, 

90, 112, 114, 145, 197, 251 
Flournoy, Thomas, 22 
Florain, Jean-Louis, 114 
Fort, Paul, 206 
Fourcaud, L. de, 34 
France, Anatole, 13, 30, 41, 45, 

72, 131-154, 197-198, 201 
Francis, St., 182, 238 
Franck, Henri, 202 
Fromentin, Eugene, 202 



INDEX 



299 



G 



Gall, F. J., 35 

Gaultier, Jules de, 46-47, 210 

Gautier, Theophile, 84, 114, 135, 

137, 177 
Gavarni, Paul, 36 
Geniaux, Charles, 201 
Gide, Andre, 238, 258-259 
Gilbert, Pierre, 126 
Gillouin, Een6, 199, 242 
Goethe, J. W., 84, 137, 179, 193, 

199, 208 
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 

112, 177 
Gourmont, Remy de, 198 
Grasset, Jules, 129-130 
Greco, El, 84 
Gu^rin, Charles, 185-206 
Guerin, Maurice de, 137, 209 
Guys, Constantin, 36 



109, 116-117, 125, 157-158, 165- 
166, 188, 230, 242, 253. 258 

Jammes, Francis, 183-185, 194 

Janet, Pierre, 43-44 

Joan of Arc, 212-213, 221, 229 

Johnson, Samuel, 102 

Joinville, Jean de, 227 

Jones, H. C, 61 

Josephine, Empress, 136 

Joubert, Joseph, 132 

Jouve, Pierre-Jean, 192 



Kahn, Gustave, 200 

Kallen, H. M., 21 

Kant, Immanuel, 5-6, 13-14, 72, 

85-86, 235 
Kelvin, Lord, 6 
Krisinska, Maria, 200 



Halevy, Daniel, 46, 239 

Hamelin, Octave, 15 

Hanotaux, Gabriel, 235 

Hartmann, K. R., 6, 87 

Hegel, George, v, 85-87, 89, 102 

Henriot, Emile, 186 

Heraclitus, 71, 168 

Herder, J. G., 6 

H^r^dia, Jos6 Maria de, 185 

Herford, 103 

Hesiod, 225 

Hobbes, Thomas, 62 

Homais, 114 

Homer, 225 

Hugo, Victor, 162, 173, 186, 201, 

209, 225, 227 
Hume, David, 56 
Huysmans, J. K., 33, 39, 162 



Ibsen, Henrik, 244, 246 

J 

Jacobi, F. H., 6 

20-23, 45, 50, 62, 73-75, 90-91, 
James, William, viii, 7, 11, 17, 



La Bruyfere, Jean de, 152 

Lafon, Andr6, 185 

La Fontaine, Jean de, 208 

Lamb, Charles, 27 

La Rochefoucauld, Frangois, 90- 

91, 144, 152 
Lasserre, Pierre, 46, 178, 202, 216 
Lavater, J. C, 35 
Le Bon, 187 
Le Brun, Roger, 144 
Leconte, de Lisle, Charles, 135, 

137-138, 140, 146, 209 
Le Dantec, 9 
Le Goffic, Charles, 185 
Leibnitz, G. W., 42, 61, 219 
Lemaitre, Jules, 30-31, 140-141, 

201, 236 
Lequier, 14 

Lerberghe, Charles van, 200 
Leroux, Pierre, 87 
Le Roy, Edouard, 7-8, 12, 15, 78, 

130, 155, 247 
Lichtenberger, Henri, 46 
Lindsay, A. D., ix 
Lionnet, Jean, 185 
Lotte, E. J., 78, 214, 222, 236, 

245 
Loyola, Ignatius de, 142 
Lucian, 134, 147 



300 



INDEX 



M 



Maeterlinck, Maurice, vi, 173, 

185, 200, 217 
Mahomet, 1 

Maistre, Joseph de, 23-24 
Malebranche, Nicolas, 17, 62, 78 
Malherbe, Frangois de, 188, 207 
Mallarm^, Stephane, 160, 162, 

165, 176, 182, 185, 203 
Mallere, Andre, 91 
Manet, Edouard, 36 
Margueritte, Paul, 38 
Maritain, J., 77 
Marivaux, P. C. de, 173 
Marx, Karl, 86, 102, 152, 199 
Mauclair, Camille, 206 
Mauriac, Frangois, 39, 185, 258 
Maurras, Charles, 41, 48, 95, 112, 

125-126, 137-138, 148, 199, 206- 

207, 209, 211, 214, 230 
Meleager, 134 
Menard, Louis, 138, 209 
Mendes, Catulle, 33-34, 185 
Meredith, George, 90, 92 
Meun, de, 130 
Michelangelo, 23, 197 
Michelet, Jules, 87, 100, 226-227 
Milhaud, Gaston, 7-8, 12 
Mill, J. S., 23 
Milton, John, 234-235 
Mithouard, Adrien, 183-185 
Mockel, Albert, 200 
Moliere, J. B., 1, 108 
Monet, Claude, 36 
Monnier, Henri, 114 
Montaigne, Michel, 1, 29, 144, 

149, 152, 230 
Montegut, Emile, 37 
Monteil, Maurice, 204 
Montesquieu, Charles, 37 
Moreas, Jean, 125, 195-211 
Moreau, Gustave, 34-35 
Moselly, Emile, 239 
Musset, Alfred de, 84, 177, 208 



N 



Napoleon, 97, 102, 136 
Nerval, Gerard de, 246 
Newman, John, v, viii, 77 
Newton, Isaac, 15, 52 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19-20, 46- 
47, 98, 208, 244, 246, 268 



Noailles, Mme. de, 200, 210-211 
Novalis, Friedrich, 6 



Oliphant, Mrs. Margaret, 172 
Olle-Laprune, Leon, 15 
Orsatti, Charles, 185 



Parodi, A., 45 

Pascal, Blaise, 1-2, 10, 17, 43, 46- 

47, 67, 102-103, 116, 149, 152, 

167, 177, 219, 258 
Pascary, Jean, 222-230 
Pasteur, Louis, 9 
Peguy, Charles, 78, 150, 212-241, 

245 
Penjon, A., 15 
Perrault, Charles, 42 
Perroy, Charles, 185 
Phidias, 134, 136 
Philippe, C. L., 258 
Piat, Abbe, 78 
Pillon, F., 14-15 
Plato, 42, 93, 101, 134 
Plessys, Maurice du, 206 
Plotinus, 93 

Poincare, Henri, 6-7, 13, 19 
Pomairols, Charles de, 201, 248 
Porche, Frangois, 240-241 
Pradines, 47 

Proudhon, P. J., 35, 87, 152 
Provoust, Am^dee, 185 
Prudhomme, Joseph, 114 
Psichari, Ernest, 257 

Q 

Quinet, Edgar, 87 

R 

Rabelais, Frangois, 148, 237 
Racine, J. B., 1, 102, 173, 175, 

192, 209, 225 
Rageot, Gaston, xi 
Rauh, F., 47 
Ravaisson-MoUien, Felix, iv, xi, 

14, 62, 149, 195, 216 
Raynaud, Ernst, 206 
Rebell, Hugues, 206 
Regnier, Henri de, 201, 206, 210 



INDEX 



301 



Regnier, Mme. de, 211 

Renan, Ernest, 3, 17, 41, 81, 83, 

87, 100, 112, 125, 135, 137, 140, 

225, 257 
Renouvier, Charles, 11, 14-18, 20, 

22, 32 
Rett^, Adolphe, 185 
Ribot, Theodule, 43 
Richard-Mounet, Louis, 176 
Rieux, Lionel des, 126 
Rimbaud, Arthur, 38-39, 158-162, 

165-166, 176, 186, 205 
Rivarol, Antoine, 112 
Riviere, Jacques, 155-156, 167 
Robespierre, Maximilien, xii 
Rod, Edouard, 38 
Rodin, Auguste, 197 
Rolland, Romain, 239, 244 
Romains, Jules, 186-194, 238, 251 
Ronsard, Pierre de, 136, 199, 206- 

207 
Rousseau, J. J., 1-2, 87, 115, 132, 

246 
Rubens, P. P., 175 
Ruskin, John, viii 
Russell, Bertrand, 61 



S 



St. Amand, 1 

Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, 2 
St. Victor, Paul de, 137 
Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 100, 115, 142, 

165, 176-177, 256 
Salisbury, Lord, 41 
Salom^, Rene, 241 
Samain, Albert, 210 
Sand, Georges, vii, 84, 90, 142 
Sangnier, Marc, 12 
Schelling, F. W., 6, 87 
Schiller, F. C. S., viii, 20, 230- 

232, 244-245 
Schlegel, Wilhelm, 6 
Schlumberger, Jean, 239 
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 6, 87, 163, 

180, 199 
Secr^tan, Charles, 11, 13, 16-18, 

20, 22 
Segond, J., iv 
Sergeant, E. S., 184, 193 
Sesostris, 147 

Shakespeare, William, 172, 204 
Shelley, P. B., 161 
Sophocles, 225 



Sorel, Georges, 48-49, 77, 152-153 
Souday, Paul, 236 
Spinoza, Baruch, xi, 249 
Spire, Andre, 241 
Spurzheim, Kaspar, 35 
Stael, Mme. de, 51, 87, 199 
Stendhal, de, see Beyle, Henri 
Stevenson, R. L., 14, 61, 83 
Strauss, Richard, 199 
Stuart-Merrill, Francis, 200 
Suar^s, Andre, 37, 200, 212, 223, 

230, 238-240, 258-259 
Sue, Eugene, 201 
Sully-Prudhomme, R. F., 185 
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 42, 159 
Svrift, Jonathan, 89, 151 
Swinburne, A. C, 209 
Sydney, Philip, 123 



Tacitus, 209 

Tailhade, Laurent, 36 

Tailhede, Raymond de la, 206 

Taine, Hippolyte, 3, 5, 12, 37, 87, 
90-91, 95, 98, 101-102, 108-109, 
112, 114-115, 117, 124-125, 129- 
130, 135, 137, 192, 207, 209, 
220, 243 

Tarde, J. G., 187, 199 

Tennyson, Alfred, viii 

Tharaud, Jean and Jerome, 202, 
217, 239, 241 

Theocritus, 184 

Theresa, St., 142 

Thibault, Noel, 144 

Thierry, Albert, 241 

Tolstoi, L. N., 36, 244, 246, 258 

Tonqu^dec, J. de, xiii, 159, 167 



Vacherot, Etienne, 35 

Vallery-Radot, Robert, 185, 258 

Valles, Jules, 90 

Vanier, 203 

Variot, Jean, 258 

Verhaeren, Emile, 186-188, 200 

Verlaine, Paul, 38-39, 159, 185, 

188, 197, 203, 205 
Vermenouze, Arsene, 185 
Viau, Th^ophile de, 1 
Vico, G. B., 226 



302 



INDEX 



Vi^le-Griffin, Frangois, 200, 206, 

210 
Vigny, Alfred de, 145, 208 
Vildrac, Charles, 192-193 
Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Philippe, 

34, 162, 172, 198 
Villon, Francois, 39, 208 
Virgil, 204, 225 
Visan, Tancrede de, yiii, 184 
Vivien, Mme. Ren6e, 211 
Vogii^, E. Melchior de, 12, 36-37, 

126, 188 
Voltaire, Frangois, 2, 37, 52, 83 

W 

Wagner, Richard, 34, 84, 199, 

244, 246 
Washington, George, 97 
Weber, Jean, iii, 46, 186 
Webster, John, 175 



Whistler, J. McN., 23, 34, 36 
Whiteing, Richard, 124 
Whitman, Walt, 186, 211 
Wilbois, Joseph, 12 
William, Caldwell, xii 
Winckelmann, 137, 199 
Wordsworth, William, 44, 193 
Wotton, William, 123 
Wyzewa, Teodor de, 33-34, 39-40 



Yeats, W. B., 87 



Zangwill, Israel, 220 
Zeno, 52-53 

Zola, Emile, viii, 3, 37, 146, 186, 
201 



t 



le 



